IMEC’s 2019 Conference

Francesco joined IMEC as the CEO in June 2015. He started his career at sea in 1993 when after a brief stint on local ferries he joined Princess Cruises. He spent the following 9 years enjoying a number of managerial roles on board until he was offered a move to the shore based office of what was then P&O Princess Cruises. His shore based career saw him take on a number of Marine HR roles, which included being responsible for Recruitment, Training, Industrial Relations and Reward Management for the Marine, Technical, Hotel and Medical personnel of a large fleet of luxury vessels.

By the time he left he had reached the position of Senior HR Manager and was responsible for a pool of over 12,000 seafarers from more than 50 different nationalities. A brief period in his native Italy saw him working as HR Manager for MSC Cruises before a move back to the UK where he took over responsibility for the London based Crewing Division of K Line LNG.

Dr Claire Pekcan is Director of Safe Marine, a consultancy specialising in People and Safety Management in the maritime sector and whose mission is to inspire and guide maritime organisations to excel at managing risk through evidence-based management practices.

Formerly a Professor of Maritime Applied Psychology at Warsash Maritime Academy, Claire has helped ship management companies understand the drivers of their safety culture, developed safety management systems for ports, advised on the management of fatigue risk in ship and shore operations, contributed to two major research projects into new technologies on-board ship and collision-avoidance algorithms for Marine Autonomous Surface Ships, and led the development of a Postgraduate Certificate in Maritime Education and Training for IMEC.

Recently she has advised INTERTANKO and OCIMF on the development of a behavioural competency framework for vessel operators as well as assisted INTERTANKO to develop a Human Resource Management Maturity Model.

Claire currently sits on the Maritime Advisory Board of Maritime CHIRP, the Sailor’s Society Advisory Group, is a member of IMarEST’s Human Element Working Group, a regular contributor to the UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency Human Element Advisory Group and technical consultant to INTERTANKO’s Human Element Committee of which she was formerly Vice Chair.

Dr. Max Johns is professor for Maritime Management and Business Development at HSBA Hamburg School of Business Administration. He is also Managing Director of VDR, the German Shipowners‘ Association.

Dr. Johns is from Hamburg, Germany. He holds academic degrees from Universities in Montpellier (France), Leuven (Belgium) and Tübingen (Germany). He worked as a journalist in South Africa and for ten years in leading positions with German broadcaster ZDF, before joining Eurovision in Geneva.

Dr. Johns has been teaching as lecturer for many years at Universities in Tübingen, Mainz, Berlin and Hamburg. In 2016 he was awarded a professorship at HSBA in the field of ship finance, ship management, business development. He also teaches on strategic negotiations and innovation.

Dr. Johns is married and father of a daughter. His preferred pastime is mountain hiking, skiing and climbing.

Dr Poulis is the General Manager of Epsilon Hellas, the Chairman-Elect of IMEC’s Recruitment & Training Committee and a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University.

He has a wide research, consultancy, managerial, educational and teaching experience across four countries and in the Maritime, FMCG and Publishing industries. He has taught in various Universities (e.g. Manchester, Essex, Queen Mary, University of London, National University of Ireland, ESCP), acted as Director of PG and UG programmes, assumed key institutional roles in the European and British Academy of Management and been a validator or evaluator for several Universities and publishing houses. He holds a PhD in International Business from Manchester Business School and has also studied in the Athens University of Economics and Business, the University of Antwerp and UMIST.

Cormac Gebruers is the Head of College at NMCI, the National Maritime College of Ireland. Before his Head of College appointment in June 2018, Cormac was Head of Research & Innovation in the College from 2012. In that role, he oversaw the delivery of more than 30 international projects in the areas of maritime operations and maritime mechatronics, a number concerned with the role of technology in mission critical maritime operations and with future maritime training & education needs.

A professional mariner and computer scientist, Cormac has worked extensively with maritime IT for the last 30 years including seven years with navigation systems multinational Transas (now Wärtsilä) where he delivered numerous Vessel Traffic Services, on-board systems and maritime training simulation solution projects worldwide. Cormac has been involved in technology and maritime research & innovation for almost two decades. He has a particular interest in that messy space where people and technology collide.

As Head of College at NMCI, Cormac is now responsible for delivering the immediate and future maritime education & training needs of those Irish and international maritime professionals who study & train at NMCI, and for continuing to help shape and deliver the strategy underpinning NMCI’s innovative research work in maritime technology and operations.

Dr Panos Desyllas is Reader/Associate Professor of Strategy at the University of Bath, School of Management. Previously he has held posts at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research as a Research Associate, the University of Oxford’s Said Business School as a Post-doctoral Fellow and the Manchester Business School as a Lecturer. He has served as a PhD Director at Bath and has been a visiting scholar at HEC Paris, Cambridge University, McGill University and the University of St. Gallen. He was educated at University College London (B.Sc.) and the University of Cambridge (M.Phil., Ph.D.).

His research focuses on (a) understanding how technology companies employ different modes of corporate development – such as Mergers and Acquisitions – to access new knowledge and enhance their innovation and economic performance; and (b) exploring how knowledge-intensive business service firms profit from process, product and business model innovation. His work has been funded by Lloyds of London and the ESRC/EPSRC and has been published in leading international journals.

Dr Malcolm James Cook is a principal engineer. He was responsible for Human Reliability Analysis within a major program and is now seconded to Engineering Assurance. He is a system designer, commercial researcher, academic and project engineer and has accrued over 29 years of experience in a wide range of applications. He has worked on advanced systems interface technology, command and control systems, weapons and targeting, ISTAR, advanced sensing, human reliability in critical systems, anti-fratricidal technology and intelligence analysis.  His work has involved military land, sea and air systems.

His role has been as a human factors expert with application of knowledge of situation awareness, mental workload, sensemaking, multi-tasking, multi-sensory interfaces, metacognitive aspects of information processing in command and intelligence. He particularly enjoys taking psychology into the real world in time critical applications with safety critical consequences. He is a joint Goodrich Medal winner for a paper presented at Warship 2017 and was given a patron’s award at INEC/ISCSS in 2018.

Dr Panos Desyllas is Reader/Associate Professor of Strategy at the University of Bath, School of Management. Previously he has held posts at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Business Research as a Research Associate, the University of Oxford’s Said Business School as a Post-doctoral Fellow and the Manchester Business School as a Lecturer. He has served as a PhD Director at Bath and has been a visiting scholar at HEC Paris, Cambridge University, McGill University and the University of St. Gallen. He was educated at University College London (B.Sc.) and the University of Cambridge (M.Phil., Ph.D.).

His research focuses on (a) understanding how technology companies employ different modes of corporate development – such as Mergers and Acquisitions – to access new knowledge and enhance their innovation and economic performance; and (b) exploring how knowledge-intensive business service firms profit from process, product and business model innovation. His work has been funded by Lloyds of London and the ESRC/EPSRC and has been published in leading international journals.

Dr Earthy has worked for Lloyd’s Register for 27 years.  He is technical authority for human factors (HF) in LR Marine&Offshore, including the R&D programme and the introduction of Ergonomics into Class.  His technical speciality is the assurance of the quality of Human Factors Integration and human-centred design, with special reference to advanced ICT.  His other research interests are: the introduction of human factors into the marine industry, standardisation of human factors, sociotechnical systems, and system resilience.

Jonathan has a BSc from Durham and a PhD from Aston. Prior to LR he worked for BP Exploration. He is founding secretary of the LR Rules Human Factors Panel and was technical supervisor of the award-winning LRF Alert! human element awareness-raising initiative. He attends the IMarEST Human Element Working Group, SIGTTO Human Element Committee, MOD/Industry HFI working group and the Maritime CHIRP Advisory Board. He is an associate professor at the University of Western Norway. He has participated standards development since the mid-1980s and is convenor of ISO TC159/SC4/WG6 Human-centred design for interactive systems.  He is a special editor for the journal Interacting with Computers.

He has written five standards, five journal papers, two book chapters, around 30 reviewed EC deliverables, and more than 40 conference papers and magazine articles.  He has convened or organised fifteen workshops and panels, two conferences and three commercial tutorials.

Dr Poulis is the General Manager of Epsilon Hellas, the Chairman-Elect of IMEC’s Recruitment & Training Committee and a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University.

He has a wide research, consultancy, managerial, educational and teaching experience across four countries and in the Maritime, FMCG and Publishing industries. He has taught in various Universities (e.g. Manchester, Essex, Queen Mary, University of London, National University of Ireland, ESCP), acted as Director of PG and UG programmes, assumed key institutional roles in the European and British Academy of Management and been a validator or evaluator for several Universities and publishing houses. He holds a PhD in International Business from Manchester Business School and has also studied in the Athens University of Economics and Business, the University of Antwerp and UMIST.

Oleg Grygoriuk was born in 1983 in Odessa, Ukraine. Before joining and later chairing the seafarers’ wing of the Marine Transport Workers’ Trade Union of Ukraine (the MTWTU), he has gained a considerable seagoing experience as a navigation officer, working on board the foreign-shipowners’ vessels.

In 2008, Oleg Grygoriuk joined the largest maritime trade union in Ukraine, the MTWTU, the only maritime affiliate to the International Transport Workers’ Federation in Ukraine, representing a massive membership of 75,000 maritime transport workers of Ukraine.

In 2011 Oleg Grygoriuk was elected to the position of the First Vice Chairman of MTWTU, and in 2015 headed the MTWTU’s largest organisational unit, the Local Black Sea Trade Union Organization of Seafarers (the LBSTUS), representing the membership of over 45,000 Ukrainian mariners.

Representing the labor interests of Ukrainian seafarers, Mr. Grygoriuk is a chief IBF negotiator at the local all-Ukrainian level, member of the ITF negotiation team at the central IBF negotiations with the JNG; a certified trainer of trainers on MLC, 2006 in Ukraine.

Mr. Grygoriuk’s main course of action is to promote seafarers’ profession, coupled with boosting the number of jobs for Ukrainian mariners, as well as successful implementation of investment and education projects in maritime education and training in Ukraine, development and introduction of strategic programs aimed at strengthening and enlargement of the Union membership, as well as successful implementation of international labor regulations into the national legislation of Ukraine.