Cold Chain Innovation: Digitalization, Resilience & Sustainability

Ruud van der Geer is a Dutch creative problem solver with a passion for temperature-controlled pharma logistics and supply chain innovation.

With a degree in Industrial Design and Business Administration and Six Sigma Black Belt certification, Ruud has built a career as a subject matter expert in pharma packaging, transportation, product handling & supply innovation.

In 2003, he joined MSD and currently serves the Global Supply Chain Deliver Team as lead for global logistics solutions and EMEA Product Handling responsible for temperature-control and monitoring strategies and innovations, working on transformational projects that include MSD’s logistics and supply chain digitalization.

In addition to this work, Ruud also held various advisory board positions for other companies and organizations in the transport, thermal protection and monitoring industries.

Through his work, Ruud aims to support improved quality of life and access to health. Outside of work, Ruud likes to spend time outdoors long distance walking or spending time indoors with the family and cats.

During 22+ years Dirk has acquired extensive expertise in biologics engineering, project management, and technical leadership within the healthcare industry. He started his career at Siemens-Axiva in Germany, before moving to LSMW Engineering Consultants in Switzerland, managing diverse engineering projects for life sciences clients. At B.Braun Medical, he was part of the Quality organization and involved in Process validations as well as investment projects. Concurrently, he went back to university and obtained his master’s degree in industrial engineering in Berlin.

While working for Crucell’s European Programs Office he specialized in operational excellence projects and investment portfolio management. After that he led for several years the multidisciplinary Engineering & Technical Services business unit at Janssen Vaccines on the Bern site. In early 2022 he joined Johnson & Johnson’s Advanced Therapies Supply Chain in Belgium and built up the Manufacturing Engineering organization for the CAR-T manufacturing sites, in a partnership with Legend Biotech. Since mid-2024 he is working on strategic initiatives for J&J’s CAR-T program in EMEA.

Dirk is inspired by applying his engineering background, skills, and expertise to provide #missionsupport in making disease history. He resides with his partner and four children in central Switzerland.

Andrea leads the Cell and Gene Therapy and Direct-to-Patient service lines, with a focus on defining strategy, driving growth and solving operational and process challenges which arise from the complexity of these shipments. With a wealth of expertise and experience gained across academia, pharmaceutical services and clinical trials logistics, Andrea has served in a number of senior leadership roles in research and development, clinical trial supply chain as well as product and project management in contract research organizations and pharma logistics companies before joining World Courier in 2021.

Andrea holds a diploma in Biochemistry from the Freie Universität Berlin and a PhD from the Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics. Her scientific career includes 12 years’ research in gene technology, pharmacology and preclinical development, both in academic research and in biotech companies.

Andrea is a passionate author, lecturer and trainer for cell & gene therapy, regulations and clinical trial logistics at universities and training institutes and is also an active member of the ISPE (International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering) and the female manager network of the VBU (Verband der Biotechnologieunternehmen).

Sebastian is an accomplished and results-driven Logistics Professional, with 20 years’ experience gained within several leading multinational organizations in various management positions. From 2012 – 2016 he successfully developed the footprint of DHL Global Forwarding in the Eastern European region from 2012-2016. Afterwards Sebastian has been promoted to develop the global Reefer vertical and took the lead of the product innovation as well as business development in the life science & healthcare sector for DHL temperature-controlled ocean freight.

In 2022 Sebastian joined A.P.Moller Maersk, taking the position of Global Head of Pharma Cold Chain product where Sebastian will use his vast experience of the sector and ocean industry to develop and strengthen the pharma cold chain product of Maersk and supporting the overall Integrator strategy.

Jette began her career as a nurse and spend 13 exciting years in different trauma departments assisting in surgeries, coordinating, planning and making sure that all needed equipment was at hand. The insights she gained working at these hospitals proved to be a very valuable base for moving into the MedTech and Pharma business.

She spent another 13 years in various roles within sales management before joining the Johnson & Johnson CRS program. In 2019, she was sent to East Africa to support a change management program in an NGO working to provide health care to the most vulnerable parts of the African population. There she saw how climate change is making tough life conditions impossible. The unmet need of action became so clear to her that she decided it was time to change her career path once again.

Coming back to the Nordics, with great support of a visionary General Manager, she started building a Nordic organization for environmental sustainability within Johnson & Johnson Med Tech. Building on the words from Johnson & Johnson's Corporate Chief Officer for sustainability Paulette Frank: “Healthy people need a healthy planet.” This initiative has now grown to also include the Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine business and the team works tirelessly to increase awareness internally and externally on how to implement sustainability in business and healthcare.

Her ultimate goal is to be made redundant. She believes environmental sustainability has become an integrated part of everything we do: from research and development and the "end of life" of products, to preventing disease and how we treat patients, and how we live our lives.

With 25 years of experience Carsten is a master of digital architectures in Life Science manufacturing. He has worked with numerous companies developing their digitial business capabilities. He is a thought leader in life sciences manufacturing operations management advising clients on achieving ambitious goals such as Review-by-Exception and Real-Time-Release.

Carsten has a speciality with clinical supplies secondary packaging and distribution and the numerous challenges in this area.

Zayheda Khan was appointed Chief Commercial Officer in December 2022. She has more than 20 years of experience in a variety of roles within the clinical trial sectors including preclinical, clinical, proposal and budgeting, procurement and program management.

Zayheda oversees the Marketing, Sales/KAM, Commercial Operations, Procurement and Project Management functions with the aim of assessing customer needs and provide cost-effective tailor-made solutions.  She is also responsible for the commercial data analysis for accurate forecasts and opportunity pipeline management. Her organisation is driven to develop customer partnerships and drive forward the success of the commercial projects in an ever-changing clinical trial landscape.

She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Lancashire and Master and PhD Degrees in Pharmacology from The University of Bradford.

Thomas Ellmann is globally responsible to coordinate all X-BU development of the Specialty Pharma/ Clinicals Logistics capacity within DHL Life Sciences Sector. HE is also leading a team of global Account manager that look after a portfolio of Biopharmaceutical customers. He serves as a member of the Global Life Sciences Sector Team.

During the Pandemic he was responsible to coordinate the Solutions and Services development across the different Divisions in DP DHL to effectively supply Covid Vaccines, PPE, Kits etc...to customers and markets globally

Prior to this role Thomas has joined the DHL CSI Team in January 2016 where he was responsible as a Sales Leader for the EMEA region. In this position he had responsibility for the Sales and business development for a portfolio of large Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices companies as well as territory responsibility for the Emerging Markets in Middle East and Africa.

Before in Nov 2007 – Dec 2015 Thomas was the Global Sector Head for the Life Sciences and Chemicals Sector for our Road Freight Division and was representing DHL Freight on the Global Life Sciences Steering Committee.

Prior of joining DP DHL, Thomas has spent several years in the FMCG (Procter & Gamble, Nike) and Specialty Chemicals (Firmenich SA) Industry where he had several roles in Supply Chain and Customer Services.

Thomas holds a master's degree in physics from the WWU Münster.

Mikkel Pind holds a degree from the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (pharmacist) and has been working for H. Lundbeck since 2002 in various positions within QA, ranging from approving qualification of utility systems and production equipment to internal and external audits and releasing finished goods.  

Over the last 10 years he has been focused on the global distribution of H. Lundbeck’s finished goods, developing internal procedures addressing GDP requirements and implementing security aspects. This is a global effort to establish and align all internal GDP regulatory requirements and H. Lundbeck’s minimum security requirements across the organization, protecting the patient from harm in an increasingly complex global supply chain.  

Mikkel has also been part of initiatives driving digital innovation when implementing a new logger system going from a manual excursion evaluation (taking days to process) to a fully automatic temperature evaluation system--making use of digital stability data to ensure instant excursion processing and eliminating any delay at the customer.  

Patient safety is what personally drives Mikkel to put emphases on global collaboration and alignment, internally at H. Lundbeck, as well as externally. He is also active in educating the industry on GDP subjects through teaching at Pharmakon in Denmark.

Brian Wallin is responsible for the development and execution of CCT’s 
Customer Optimization and Implementation Services and Commercial Management 
focused on the Cell and Gene Therapy Industry.

He has over 22 years of packaging industry experience focused on cold chain 
packaging, distribution, and logistics within food (FreshRealm) and Pharmaceutical 
(Amgen, Modality Solutions, and Kite Pharma) Most recently, Brian worked at Kite 
Pharma a Gilead Company, as the Associate Director of Packaging Engineering leading 
Kites Global Packaging Engineering team.

Brian received his Bachelor of Science in Packaging Engineering from the University of 
Wisconsin Stout. He has been a member of both the International Safe Transit 
Association (ISTA) Pharma Committee, and a member of the Parental Drug Association 
(PDA) Pharmaceutical Cold Chain Interest Group (PCCIG) where he has co-authored 
ISTA standards, and guidance documents, along with PDA Technical Report 39 and 
several other Cold Chain related publications

Kristian is the Senior Director of Sales for EMEA and APAC at Cold Chain Technologies (CCT) BV, and is located outside of London, England. He has been with CCT for over four years and arrived with extensive background within temperature-controlled packaging which has been accumulated over the past decade. Having previously worked with some of the leading 3PL’s he has in-depth knowledge of pharmaceutical logistics and understanding the risks to temperature sensitive payloads.

Henry Moran has been involved in pharmaceutical logistics for more than 15 years.

He joined ASC Associates in January 2016 as a Director and Chief Operating Officer. In the role, he supports clients in all matters of Supply Chain Security and Good Distribution Practice compliance.

Prior to joining ASC Associates, he worked for Mundipharma with responsibility for global supply & logistics, including performing risk evaluation and mitigation activities for pharmaceutical products in the Global Supply Chain.

Henry is a Six Sigma Black Belt, and a qualified Lead Auditor

Marisa Remsing is a qualification engineer at ELPRO Meßtechnik GmbH. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Biotechnology from Esslingen University of Applied Sciences and has been working in the life sciences industry over five years. She has experience in planning, implementing and documenting qualification projects for plants, systems and processes according to current GMP requirements. She enjoys working with diverse teams and clients to deliver high quality and safe solutions. Marisa is also an award-winning academic and professional, having received the VDI study award, the Esslingen University of Applied Sciences award. In her private life, she enjoys sports nutrition (designed for women) and cycle-based training. Her goal is to continuously expand her knowledge and skills and to take on new challenges in the life sciences and nutrition industry.

With over two decades of experience in senior management roles with a number of global multinationals, Ger is an experienced logistics and supply chain professional with a strong focus on cold chain, pharma logistics and specialist transportation.

After completing a pharmaceutical business operations degree in 2018, in support of his career path, his entrepreneurial mindset led him to join Biostor Ireland in early 2022 as Chief Operations Officer and more recently as a director and shareholder. Biostor are an EU certified tissue and cell establishment, regulated for the importation, storage and transportation of human tissues and cells for human application and a biobank for the storage of clinical trial material, master and working cell banks and are CGT specialists. They deal with cryogenic storage and transportation at a variety of minus temperature ranges on a global scale.

Ger has been very influential as the lead in business development, brand awareness and innovation. He is focused on assisting patients and industry in reducing regulatory and product access challenges and turning them into opportunities to positively impact patients.

Ger is married, living in Dublin with his wife and two teenage daughters. They love to travel and spend as much quality family time together as possible.

Coming Soon

Stefan is managing director of SmartCAE, where he works in the field of mathematical modeling of technical systems. His expertise is in thermal modeling and his company's software SmartCAEThermalpackaging, SmartCAETemperatureProfils, and SmartCAELaneRisk are used for risk-based simulation of cold chain.

Coming Soon

Paul is Chief Operating Officer of VLE Therapeutics Ltd., a 100% Irish-owned biopharmaceutical company, which operates in collaboration with its sister company, APC Ltd. and global companies, to accelerate the development of lifechanging medicines for patients. VLE Therapeutics focuses on the clinical manufacturing of advanced therapies at the cutting edge of science. With our science-led manufacturing mindset, we aim to provide a unique offering within the sector. The business has already built a global client base for these critical services.

Paul has more than 30 years' experience in the biopharmaceutical & pharmaceutical industries, working in FDI Global Multinationals and SMEs, at national and global levels in a variety of operational, strategic and leadership roles. He also has a strong passion for building Ireland’s strategic position in the global BioPharma sector, including being the current Vice Chair and previous Chair of Ibec BioPharmaChem Ireland, which is the leading representative employer body for the biopharma and chemical sector in Ireland.

Paul holds a B.Sc. in Science (Chemistry & Pharmacology), a Postgraduate Diploma in Business Management & Finance, and certifications in Project Management, Black Belt, and Human Performance Thinking.