Leeza Osipenko, PhD

CEO

Leeza gained experience in academia, consulting and public sector before establishing Consilium Scientific in 2020. After completing PhD in Systems Engineering in the USA, she came to England. Her career started at the University of Warwick Medical School where she worked as Senior Research Fellow on evaluating non-invasive foetal DNA tests. Then she relocated to London and joined a consulting company as Principal Economist leading on projects for NICE and other UK public sector departments. Leeza is an expert in Health Technology Assessment and between 2014 and 2018 she served as a Director of NICE Scientific Advice. Her academic work focuses on examining the status quo of clinical research, through quality improvement, transparency, and methodological rigour. In particular, she is interested in clinical data integrity, health policy, applied clinical research, and clinical trial design. Between 2018 and 2021 Leeza was a Senior Lecturer in Practice at the London School of Economics (LSE) Department of Health Policy and currently she is a Senior Visiting Fellow at LSE Health. Leeza serves on the Board of Directors at HealthSenseUK and ISRCTN.

Jack Lewis, MSc

Research Operations Manager

Since joining Consilium Scientific in January 2024, Jack has become a core driver of the organisation’s qualitative research. With an MSc in Natural Sciences from the University of Exeter (2020), his expertise spans the full research lifecycle—from conducting in-depth stakeholder interviews to performing rigorous thematic analysis and developing manuscripts for white papers and journal articles. Jack delivers qualitative research for the NIHR-funded RareCare project and Arnold Ventures funded Evimeter project. He is also involved in consultancy work on immunotherapy treatments and clinical trial access in multiple myeloma. In addition to preparing ethics submissions and developing grant applications, Jack helps facilitate the Consilium’s educational seminars and oversees project budgets and treasury functions.

Ekaterina Cleary, PhD

Data Scientist

Dr. Ekaterina Cleary holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and a Master's Degree in Bioinformatics from Boston University. Her PhD thesis examined the genetic and environmental determinants of Alzheimer’s disease progression. Ekaterina completed her postdoctoral studies at the Center for Integration of Science and Industry at Bentley University, where she is best known for quantifying the substantial contribution of federal grant funding (i.e. National Institutes of Health) towards pharmaceutical drug discovery. With prior experience in academia and consulting, her current work sits at the intersection of health policy, evidence evaluation, and medical reimbursement. At Consilium Scientific, she leads the development of Evimeter, a quantitative framework that evaluates the strength of clinical evidence supporting breakthrough medical devices and diagnostics.

Andrea Caputo Svensson, PhD

Project Manager

Andrea holds a PhD in Marine Ecology from Stockholm University (Sweden), where he specialized as Molecular Microbiologist, and a MSc in Marine Biology from the Polytechnic University of Marche (Italy). After graduating PhD, he joined the Stockholm International Water Institute working as Programme Officer on policy issues related to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and its threat to public health and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals of the Agenda 2030. Andrea has also worked as Expert Consultant for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on the (lack of) implementation of the AMR National Action Plans and the key role of the aquaculture sector for the global food safety and security. Currently, Andrea also covers the position of Global Health Advisor at ReAct – Action on Antibiotic Resistance, where he is responsible for a wide portfolio of antibiotic resistance policy dialogues, including cancer care treatment, access to effective antibiotics, and community engagement..

Federica Mirto

Analyst

Federica holds a degree in Political Science focusing on clinical trials in European law. Following her undergraduate studies, she pursued a Master's in Cooperation and Development at Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. Beginning her career with an internship in a pharmaceutical association, she has been passionate about good clinical practice and transparency in clinical trials. With experience in both humanitarian work and corporate setting, she has dedicated herself to making a meaningful impact in the intersection of science, ethics, and humanitarian fields.

Stanley Harvell-Smith, PhD

Researcher

Stanley completed a PhD in Biological Physics at University College London in 2026, where his research focused primarily on the design, synthesis, and optimisation of magnetic nanoparticle formulations for biomedical imaging and therapeutic applications. Prior to this, he completed an MChem in Chemistry at the University of Sheffield. His background combines multidisciplinary laboratory research with scientific writing, literature analysis, project coordination, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Keen to contribute to work closer to clinical application, following PhD research conducted largely at the preclinical stage, Stanley joined Consilium Scientific as a Researcher. He primarily works on the Arnold Ventures-funded Evimeter project, a tool designed to assess and compare the strength of clinical evidence for innovative medical technologies.

Abeni Sethi

Abeni is pursuing her MSc in International Health Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, having graduated with a BSc in Neuroscience from University College London. As an intern at Consilium Scientific, she is investigating the approval of CDK4/6 inhibitors for ER+ breast cancer, evaluating surrogate endpoints, toxicity, and cost-benefit to inform regulatory decision-making. She is interested in the translation of clinical and pharmaceutical insights into real-world impact through evidence generation and synthesis.

Ania Gissen

Digital Content Specialist

Ania recently completed an MSc in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of the Arts London. Her research focuses on the use of generative AI to create accurate and trustworthy medical content.
She is particularly interested in improving the accessibility of complex medical research through AI generated animation and visual communication.

Varsha holds an MSc in Health Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Upon graduation she worked as Research Assistant at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine on a WHO project examining self-care interventions for sexual and reproductive health. She previously completed a placement at the Office of Health Economics. Varsha is interested in integrating complex frameworks and Bayesian models to answer difficult questions in health care, particularly in reproductive, maternal and child health, neurodegenerative diseases, genetic treatments and health inequity. 

Sofia Huertas Carrera, MSc

Consilium Associate

Sofia is a registered Pharmacist specialising in research methodology. She trained in Public Health at York University. During her career in primary care, she collaborated with key stakeholders in the strategic health needs assessment for North Yorkshire. Working in medical research she has developed expertise in systematic reviews and risk of bias assessments. Prior to joining Consilium Scientific, she was part of the NIHR commissioned Evidence Review Group working on health technology assessments. She is currently learning how to build cost-effectiveness economic models at ScHARR.

Till Bruckner, PhD

Consilium Associate

Till Bruckner is the founder of TranspariMED, a campaign that works to end evidence distortion in medicine, and a Research Fellow at the QUEST Center for Responsible Research. His work focuses on regulatory transparency and clinical trial registration and reporting. He previously worked for the AllTrials campaign, the Transparify think tank initiative, the anti-corruption group Transparency International, a commercial microfinance consulting company, and various international development NGOs. Till holds a PhD in political science from the University of Bristol. 

Eric Low, OBE

Chair of the Board

Eric has worked in the fields of medical research, market access and patient organisations for over 25 years. He set up Myeloma UK in 1996, leading the organisation as Chief Executive until 2017.
He currently runs a consultancy business specialising primarily in strategic market access, life sciences and healthcare policy, patient and patient group engagement.
Eric is committed and focused on improving patient outcomes and puts patients at the centre of everything he does. His goal is to have made a significant and material impact on the quality of life of patients and the prevention and curability of cancer and rare diseases. He has a strong track record of delivery and success for example in building multi-stakeholder research collaborations, patient coalitions, market access strategies, changing policy, and generally in delivering innovative solutions to complex issues, challenges and barriers standing in the way of progress.
Eric also holds several Board, honorary, advisory and voluntary positions. He also advises numerous medical and health-focused charities on a pro bono basis. He was awarded an OBE for services to charity in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2012.

Sir Andrew Dillon

Consilium Scientific UK Board Member 

Andrew Dillon graduated from the University of Manchester in 1975. He held several senior management positions in the UK National Health Service, including General Manager of the Royal Free Hospital and Chief Executive of St George’s Hospital, both academic health centres in London. He was the founding Chief Executive of NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in England from 1999 to 2020. He is now a visiting professor at the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College, London and works as an independent consultant.

Dr Martin Kaiser

Consilium Scientific UK Board Member 

Martin is a Clinician Scientist and Honorary Consultant Haematologist at The Institute of Cancer Research, London and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. In 2018, he became Team Leader of the Myeloma Molecular Therapy Group at the ICR.
He graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Aachen (RWTH), Germany, in 2004 where he also obtained an MD in Pathology for research on multiple myeloma microenvironment interactions.

Martin specialised in Haemato-Oncology at Charité University Medicine Berlin, Germany where he also pursued research in multiple myeloma and leukaemia. He was awarded a research fellowship by DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) in 2011 and joined the ICR for a postdoctoral research project in myeloma epigenetics. He was appointed Clinician Scientist and Honorary Consultant Haematologist in 2014 at the ICR and RMH and was awarded Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Pathology in 2018.

He is active member of the UK NCRI group, the UK Myeloma Research Alliance (UKMRA) network and the UK Myeloma Forum and serves as principal or co-investigator for several national and international myeloma trials. In July 2018, Martin became the first Jacquelin Forbes-Nixon Research Fellow.

His main research interest is the molecular characterisation of multiple myeloma, with the aim of designing gentler therapies tailored to patients’ needs. A particular focus of his work is high-risk myeloma.

Georgina Humphreys, PhD

Consilium Scientific UK Board Member 

Georgina is an experienced scientist with a commitment to maximising the benefits from research data. After living and working in east Africa, she worked for many years on infectious diseases in the Oxford Centre for Tropical Medicine, combining and analysing clinical trial data to detect early signs of antimalarial drug resistance. In 2018 she moved to research funding at Wellcome where she led the development and implementation of Wellcome’s clinical trial and data sharing policies, including transparency of results reporting and encouraging data sharing and re-use. She then worked at Health Data Research UK, the national institute for health data science.

Georgina now supports a range of projects through her consultancy work including; the World Health Organization (WHO) Antimicrobial Resistance Division, acting as the Secretariat for an Independent Review Panel for three clinical data sharing platforms (WAYFIND-R, Vivli and CSDR), and associate work with Research Consulting to enable universities and funders to improve their research data management.

Georgina was a Board Director of the UK clinical trial registry (ISRCTN) 2019-2024. She has been a member of the Royal Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene Grants and Awards Committee since 2022 and is also an Associate Fellow at Green Templeton College, Oxford.

Peter Whitehouse, MD, PhD

Consilium Scientific UK Board Member 

Peter J. Whitehouse, MD, PhD is Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, and Organizational Behavior at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. He received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and MD-PhD (Psychology) from The Johns Hopkins University (with field work at Harvard and Boston Universities), followed by a Fellowship in Neuroscience and Psychiatry and a faculty appointment at Hopkins. In 1986 he moved to Case Western Reserve University to develop the University Alzheimer Center.  In 1999 he founded with his wife, Catherine, The Intergenerational School, a unique public multiage, community school (www.tisonline.org). He considers himself an intergenerative, transdisciplinary designer and activist. His fields of endeavor are cognitive/brain health, integrated health care, intergenerational learning, interprofessional practice, deep bioethics, organizational aesthetics, narrative epistemology, transmedia performance arts, planetary health and play.

Kim Witczak

Kevin Knopf, MD, MPH

Kevin Knopf  is a practicing Hematologist/Oncologist and the Division Chief of Hematology and Oncology Alameda Health System, a safety net hospital in Oakland, California. He is Associate Professor of Pharmacoeconomics at the University of South Carolina School of Pharmacy and Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco where he is a member of a the Institute for Health Policy. His research focuses on cost-effectiveness, patterns and quality of care in oncology, data analytics and reducing health disparities in cancer screening, diagnosis and treatment. He began is research career at the Health Economics and Outcomes Research branch at the National Cancer Institute. Dr Knopf holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UC San Francisco, and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He completed his clinical training at Northwestern Medical School, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the National Cancer Institute.

Dr. Michael Kolodziej

Michael is Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer, ADVI Health. Dr. Kolodziej completed internal medicine and hematology-oncology training at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He then joined the faculty at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine where he was an associate professor. Dr. Kolodziej joined New York Oncology in 1998, and was a partner in the practice until 2012. He served as Medical Director for Oncology Services for US Oncology from 2007-2011. In this role, he helped direct the implementation of the USON clinical pathways initiative, the integration of the USON EMR into this program, and the development of the USON disease management and advanced care planning programs, now known as Innovent Oncology. In 2013 Dr. Kolodziej joined Aetna as National Medical Director, Oncology Solutions. He directed Aetna’s oncology delivery reform pilots and was the architect of the Aetna Oncology Medical Home program. Dr. Kolodziej joined Flatiron Health in July, 2016 as National Medical Director, Managed Care Strategy where he applied the core tech and data capabilities of Flatiron to facilitate practice transformation and success in alternative payment models. He joined ADVI in October, 2017. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. Dr. Kolodziej has published and spoken extensively on payment reform, personalized medicine, and practice care delivery transformation in oncology.

Dr. Francois Maignen

François works at NICE scientific advice team as Principal Technical Adviser. Before working at NICE, François was the Head of Operational Research and Data Analytics at the Office of Health Economics (OHE). He was the main contributor of a aimed at assessing the public health impact of Brexit for the UK and the European Union. François holds a doctorate in pharmacy, an MSc in molecular pharmacochemistry and a post-graduation diploma in hospital pharmacy and public health (Université René Descartes, Paris). Francois also holds an MSc in applied statistics (University of London).

John Hickman, DSc  

Prof Hickman is an internationally known scientist who trained in pharmacy and organic chemistry in Birmingham UK. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Cancer Research London, he held University posts in molecular pharmacology in Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester and as a visiting scientist at Yale University. As a Director of the Cancer Research Campaign’s (now CRUK) Experimental Chemotherapy group in Birmingham he was lead pharmacologist for the discovery of the drug Temozolomide used to treat brain tumours. He worked on the role of apoptosis in determining anticancer drug sensitivity and resistance, particularly the role of the BCL-2 family of proteins. He talked about his work on apoptosis in 1998 at the invitation of the Nobel Forum in Stockholm and was invited again to speak at a Nobel Symposium in 2018, this time on personalised cancer medicine. Professor Hickman moved to Paris in 2000 to direct cancer drug discovery at Servier. He retired in 2010 and then coordinated the European Union Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) consortium PREDECT. In March 2018, he co-organised an international meeting at the Francis Crick Institute entitled “The Challenges Preventing Cancer Cure”.

Dr. Lydie Meheus

Lydie is the Managing Director of the Anticancer Fund (ACF), a Belgian Research Foundation of Public Utility dedicated to the development of cancer treatments regardless of their commercial value. Lydie co-founded the Anticancer Fund in 2013 with entrepreneur and major funder Luc Verelst. She is also the Executive Director of Reliable Cancer Therapies, a Swiss non-profit organisation. Lydie is member of the Steering Committee of the 'Cancer Research for More Patient Value', a fund managed by the King Baudouin Foundation and of the Scientific and Clinical Advisory Board of OvaCure, a Danish non-profit organisation focusing on ovarian cancer. Lydie has published many international peer review manuscripts, lately on drug repurposing in cancer therapies. She is a breast cancer patient, diagnosed in 2018 and successfully treated since then.Lydie obtained a PhD in Sciences at the University of Ghent (1986). She worked at Innogenetics (1987-2004) and as VP R&D at GENimmune (2005-2008), both Belgian biopharmaceutical companies.

Dr. Jack Scannell

Jack studies biomedical R&D from both economic and scientific perspectives. He works as an independent consultant to investors, drug and biotech companies, and the public sector. He is an honorary fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at Edinburgh University. Jack worked in drug and biotech investment at UBS and at Sanford Bernstein. He was head of Discovery Research at e-Therapeutics PLC, an Oxford-based biotechnology firm. He started his career as an academic neuroscientist. He has a Ph.D. in physiology from Oxford University and a degree in medical sciences from Cambridge University.

Professor Ian Tannock

Dr. Tannock is Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Medical Biophysics at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and University of Toronto. He obtained his PhD from the Institute of Cancer Research, London University, England and his MD at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. His clinical expertise is in GU and breast cancer. His research investigated methods related to cancer clinical trials, and he chaired trials for men with metastatic prostate cancer that led to licensing of drugs that are used worldwide for this disease. Dr. Tannock is an editor of the Basic Science of Oncology textbook, now in its 6^th edition, that is used by trainees in all branches of oncology.

Dr. Tannock was a member of the Board of Directors of ASCO from 2001-2004. He chaired (2018-2020) the ASCO working group that organizes International Clinical Trials Workshops and has taught extensively in low and middle-income countries.  He received the alumnus award from M.D. Anderson Hospital, Houston, USA (1989), the Warwick Prize from the National Cancer Institute of Canada (2003), the ESMO award (2012) and the ASCO Allen Lichter award for leadership and innovation (2019). He chaired the EORTC scientific audit committee between 2009 and 2016 and was then a member of the EORTC Board. He holds honorary degrees (DSc) from London University, UK (2009) and the Universidad de la Republica, Uruguay (2020). Dr. Tannock was appointed to the Order of Canada in December 2013.