Our Team

  • Valentin loves building software and communities, and is looking forward to scaling up the early success of PyBaMM.

    He completed his PhD at the University of Oxford, followed by research positions at University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon University. He has eight years of experience creating fast and accurate models of battery performance and degradation and using these to accelerate battery design and research. He created PyBaMM in 2018.

    Outside of work, Valentin enjoys riding and racing bikes around the Pittsburgh area

Chief Executive Officer

  • Rob is passionate about accelerating impact in the green energy space by co-founding Ionworks. He works directly with customers to help build robust battery modelling solutions. Rob is excited to help the PyBaMM community continue to grow.

    He completed his PhD at the University of East Anglia, before moving into a research position at the University of Oxford. Rob has built a career delivering impact from applied mathematics research, with 8 years of experience tackling industrial mathematics problems, more than 5 of which have been in the battery sector. He has been a core developer of PyBaMM since 2018.

    At the weekends you can find Rob out and about with his family looking for good places to scoot and great places to eat.

Chief Scientific Officer

  • Tom is a physicist, electrochemist, software developer, and a passionate environmentalist. He has spent the last 10 years working on electrochemical modelling during both his PhD and two post-docs on fuel cells and batteries.

    Tom is an experienced programmer and also excels in understanding client requirements and business development. He believes in open science and open software to accelerate the green transition.

    When not working Tom can be found playing guitar, spending time in the English countryside and playing with his daughter.

Chief Technology Officer

  • Eric is a theoretical chemist and software engineer who loves building technologies with a positive impact on the world. He completed a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh and a post-doctoral fellowship at Wayne State University. After leaving academia, he worked in the automotive industry developing software for self-driving car technologies. Eric is excited to be applying his engineering experience to renewable energy applications at IonWorks.

    In his spare time, Eric enjoys baking bread, creating his own recipes, working in his garden, and trying specialty coffee.

Principal Application Engineer

Our Advisors

  • Ferran has 5 years of battery modelling experience and works on a part-time basis alongside his role as an Assistant Professor at Warwick University. He provides software support and continues relationships with academic partners whilst also providing in-depth knowledge of parameterisation for the development of our model builder application. Ferran is also in charge of our social media presence, writing joint grant applications, and managing the mentoring program that the PyBaMM team will create to support the development of future contributors.

  • Venkat is a distinguished academic with extensive technical know-how and business experience with contributions to several start-ups. Venkat joins the team as an advisor and mentor and comes with an outstanding reputation within the battery modelling field.

  • Mark enjoys solving research problems to develop green technologies, including battery systems. 

    Mark received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the College of Chemistry at the University of California (Berkeley) and an MBA from MIT.   He retired from GM in 2023 after 37 years with the company, 28 of which were in various executive roles, including Chief Engineer for Energy Management Systems and Director for chemistry and materials R&D.  He has received many international awards and is a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering.  Mark has about 200 patents, patents pending, and trade secrets and about 200 publications.

    Outside work, Mark enjoys hiking among the Sequoia sempervirens and family get-togethers in the San Francisco Bay Area.