Sonya Brown
Based in Palo Alto, Sonya is a General Partner at NVP and co-heads the Growth Equity practice where she focuses on investing across a wide range of sectors including consumer, retail, internet, and business services.
Prior to joining NVP, Sonya was at Summit Partners, a private equity firm with over $11 billion under management, where she worked for nine years in the Boston office and was responsible for leading the firm's Consumer and Internet Industry Group in North America. Sonya was engaged in all aspects of the deal process including deal sourcing, due diligence, deal negotiations and board representation. Her most recent and past board directorships and investments include Aramsco, Airborne Health, Central Security Group, Physicians Formula Holdings (NASDAQ: FACE), Snap Fitness and Sparta Systems.
Adel El Mowafi
Adel has 30 years’ experience in fish nutrition R&D and for the last Fifteen years has been working for EWOS Innovation as a senior scientist and Manager Director. EWOS Innovation is the R&D body for Cargill - EWOS; an international fish feed company operating in 20 countries. Adel has worked in academic and industrial environments in Egypt, Canada and Norway. He is also Adjunct Professor at Animal and Plant science at Nova Scotia Agricultural College and holds a black belt of six sigma. Adel has recently moved back to Canada and leading the technology application team of Cargill Aqua Nutrition.
Adel is a veterinarian by training and holds a master and Ph.D. in fish nutrition.
Shahram Lavasani
Dr. Shahram Lavasani is an international keynote speaker and entrepreneur in the field of the microbiome. He received his PhD in Immunology from Lund University/Sweden. With more than two decades of teaching and research expertise on Gut-Brain axis, he has pioneered research in multiple sclerosis by demonstrating gut inflammation and barrier dysfunction and introduced microbiota-based therapies using probiotic bacterial consortia. He is the founder of ImmuneBiotech developing novel microbiome therapeutics. The company has access to a proprietary lactobacilli library and advanced selection technologies to design nutritional formulations for optimal management of the diseases. ImmuneBiotech´s first product GutMagnific® has been designed to address the underlying causes of IBS and it is currently investigated, in collaboration with Karolinska Institute, for treatment of chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) a neuroimmune condition and a possible long-term effect of Covid-19. GutMagnific® has successfully been launched in October 2019.
Silke Heinzmann
