EU-VRI - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Chief Operation Officer
- Chief Operation Officer at Steinbeis EU - VRi GmbH
Somik Chakravarty (PhD) is the Chief Operation Officer at Steinbeis EU-VRi GmbH. He holds a doctorate from Sorbonne Universités - UTC in Process Engineering with a specialisation in the field of exposure assessment and airborne risk characterization of nanomaterials. He received an EU Marie Curie ITN fellowship for completing his doctorate in collaboration with the Institut national de l'environnement industriel et des risques (INERIS, France ), with industrial and academic secondments at BASF SE and Technische Universität Braunschweig in Germany and the University of Twente in the Netherlands, respectively.
He was awarded the Jean Bricard Prix and nominated for the Prix de thèse Guy Deniélou 2019 for his PhD thesis on Dustiness and mechanical properties of cohesive and non-cohesive bulk solids. He is a mechanical engineer from the University of Sheffield with a Master's degree in Thermal power and fluids engineering from the University of Manchester in the UK.
He has more than 8 years of research experience in the field of material science, computational mechanics, powder and aerosol technology and product/process risk analysis. He has managed and contributed as a researcher in more than 10 EU and other international projects during his time at Steinbeis EU-VRi with 3 digital tools developed for EU projects selected for the EU Innovation Radar for scientific and business impact.
His research interests include risk and resilience management of critical infrastructure with a focus on cyber-physical system security, Digitalization in Industry 4.0, Process/product risk analysis, Multi-criteria decision analysis and statistical methods in risk analysis. He has more than 10 peer-reviewed publications and in excess of 110 citations in the field of process and environmental safety, powder technology and risk and resilience of cyber-physical systems within critical infrastructures.
Job Titles:
- Member of ISO TC 229 / Chair of the WG Standardization of NANOfutures
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board of Directors
Job Titles:
- Software Developer
- CIO & IT Specialist
Marjan Jelic is a software developer with more than 20 years of experience in web, application and back-end development. Since September 2016, he works as a CIO & IT Specialist and Support in the IT department of the Steinbeis EU-VRi in Stuttgart Germany.
His responsibilities are software solutions (tools) in AssureMOSS, SILICOFCM, ResiStand, RiskRadar China, SmartResilience, cALIBRAte, EC4SafeNano, ENCIRCLE, InfraStress and PANBioRA projects.
Marjan Jelic holds a Bachelor of Science degree (B.Sc) in Computer Science from the University of Novi Sad (Faculty of Technical Science in Zrenjanin), Serbia.
Medical Doctor (1979), M. Sc. (1982), Specialist in Hygiene and Microbiology (1986), Ph. D. (1995). During the period 1980 - 1991 she worked at Institute for Health Protection of Serbia (Belgrade, Yugoslavia), Department of public health and Environmental Hygiene (U.S.S.L. 2, Cittiglio, Italy), Institute of Hygiene at the Medical School of the University of Milan (Italy), Institute of Hygiene, Univ. of Tübingen (Germany).
Since 1992 she is employed at the State Health Agency Stuttgart, Germany. The main topics of her work are:
Vanessa Pfau is one of the Directors of Steinbeis Advanced Risk Technologies Africa Pty Ltd. In addition, she is employed by the Steinbeis Advanced Risk Technologies Group (R-Tech) and EU-VRi as a Senior Project Manager in the area of International Industrial Projects, European and National Research Projects and in the field of training and higher education. The activities of the Group involve projects and activities on industrial, national, EU, and international level, tackling, e.g. integrated management of risk related to new technologies, resilience and related standardization activities, and governance and regulatory aspects of risks. Since 2017 Ms. Pfau is part of the EU-VRi Executive Board.
Ms. Pfau is involved in the activities of the Steinbeis University Berlin, Transfer Institute Advanced Risk Technologies, which is offering Training and Certification in the area of Risk Engineering and Management. Ms. Pfau was responsible for implementing certification courses in European countries, as well as in South Africa and China, in cooperation with local Universities and Industry. More than 900 certificates of successful training have been provided to South African participants in the past years.
Previously she was engaged by the Department of Environmental Sociology and Technology Assessment of the University of Stuttgart and the National Aeronautics and Space Research Centre of Germany (Department of Systems Analysis and Technology Assessment). Ms. Pfau attained a Master's Degree in "Empirical Political and Social Research and Analysis" with a focus on Sociology of Risks and Technology.
Aleksandar Jovanovic (MSc. ME, PhD) has worked for industry, research, EU institutions and universities, in a number of different countries, such as Belgium and Italy (EU, university), Germany (industry, research, university), France (university), USA (industry, university, research), etc. Since 2001, he is the director of the Steinbeis Advanced Risk Technologies Group in Stuttgart, Germany providing consultancy in the areas of risk assessment and risk management for industry and public sector. He is the CEO of the European Institute for Risk & Resilience Management (EU-VRi), bringing together about 50 industrial and research organizations active in the area of applied risk and resilience management, full professor at Steinbeis University Berlin (Technical Risks) and his other current and previous assignments include Italy (Politecnico di Milano), France (Ecole Polytechnique), Japan (University of Tokyo), USA (La Jolla), Serbia, Croatia and China.
Aleksandar's main contributions to risk research and advancement of the respective state-of-the-art have been related to (a) industrial "risk projects", (b) academic research in the area of risk (especially emerging risks and resilience) and (c) European and international risk standardization.
Aleksandar has a long-year professional experience as project manager of many large international industry "risk projects", dealing with risk management, engineering risks, innovation risks, risk governance for new technologies, use of big data for risk analysis and related areas, etc. Main clients in these projects have been the EU, national governments (Norway, Belgium, Japan…), industry, utilities, insurances companies, R&D and academia. Main topics of the current projects deal with risk management in industry (e.g. for insurance, power, process) and include HSSE (Health, Safety, Security, Environment), RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance), RBI (Risk-Based Inspection. Examples of the industrial projects are, e.g., the assessing risk of 40,000 MWe installed electric power capacity for Eskom in South Africa (about $10 million) or assessing risks refineries in Gazprom. Sample EU projects managed by him include iNTeg-Risk (www.integrisk.eu-vri.eu, 19.3 million , 80+ partners), or SmartResilience (Resilience Indicators for critical infrastructures in Europe, www.smartresilience.eu-vri.eu).
In the area of academic risk research Aleksandar has been pioneering the risk-oriented probabilistic structural mechanics in 1980's (stochastic finite element method), introduced risk methods in the engineering analysis of remaining life in 1990's, developed new methods for risk-based optimization of inspection and maintenance in the industrial plants (power and process primarily). He is a coauthor of the milestone study/book on Future Global Shocks of the OECD (2013), author of 7 books and over 170 publications (www.researchgate.net/profile/Aleksandar_Jovanovic5).
As a "risk practitioner" in the area of international standardization, A. Jovanovic has contributed to the global risk community by a number of actions. He is the Convener and main author of:
Job Titles:
- Chairman of the Board of Directors