Senior executive and independent board member with more than thirty years of leadership experience and transformative strategies across numerous life science markets. Laurie has a proven track record of acceleration of impeccable commercial execution, leading to growth, profitability, global brand, and emerging market development. She has demonstrated the ability to build, galvanise, and mobilise global scientific and commercial teams. Her passion for leadership development, succession planning, and team followership, is realised by her unbounded resourceful problem-solving, creative strategies for a competitive edge, and market-dominant results.

Senior Executive with 30 years of Life Sciences experience and a proven track record in both mature and emerging markets in Western and Central Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East Africa. Successfully led organizations ranging from 40 to 1400 employees as CEO, Managing Director, and as Regional Vice President. He has extensive change management experience and broad Non-Executive and Advisory board experience. André holds an MBA degree from Tilburg University, and an MSc in Management from Purdue University, USA. He has also followed also the supervisory board member program of Nyenrode University, The Netherlands.

Caroline Vanovermeire is the Global Director of Talent, Leadership, and Organisational Development at dentsu, a high growth, fast-paced marketing services, and solutions company. She is the founder of Effra Consult, a business that focuses on all things people to boost business performance. In addition, she is a mentor to start-ups in the FinTech industry. Caroline was previously the Global Head of Organisational Development for all Support functions at Barclays and a Principal at Heidrick & Struggles’ Global Leadership Advisory practice. Caroline is a trained psychologist and coach, she also has a Masters in Human Resources management.

Kjell Mortier (Pharm., PhD) is Fund Manager for Novalis Biotech Incubation. Prior to working for Novalis, Kjell acquired approximately 20-years experience in the biotech industry working in various scientific roles. At Ablynx, now part of Sanofi, he was responsible for the bioanalytical and immunogenicity part of dedicated clinical programs. At Eurofins, a leading CRO in the pharma, food and environmental industry, he supported the CMC-analytical part for various customers in the pharma industry. Kjell also obtained certification for financial analysis at EHSAL Management school.  

Prof. Wim Van Criekinge, together with Jan, is a co-founder of the Novalis Biotech Incubation. He is a tenured professor at the University of Gent, with nearly 200 peer-reviewed international publications to his name. He founded and heads the laboratory for computational genomics and bioinformatics (BIOBIX) as well as the core sequencing facility (NXTGNT) with global collaborative reach across applied bioscience and clinical discovery. He is a co-founder of BioLizard and he leads the scientific development of the company as well as coaching the consultants. His main interest is the use of machine learning in computational biology and bioinformatics.

Dr. Liesbeth Ceelen has experience in a multinational environment as well as in start-up and scale-up companies. Over the last 15 years, she gained expertise in operational and quality management. Her key assets in this field are sales, scientific business development and strategic growth. Her role as CEO involves steering the BioLizard team, identifying and pursuing strategic opportunities with clients, as well as setting and driving metrics across business units.