Archives: Speakers

Ashish Honawar is Senior Director and Head of Data Analytics & Reporting for Global Clinical Supply at Pfizer, where he leads AI, analytics, and data strategy initiatives supporting clinical trial planning, execution, and supply operations. With nearly two decades of experience at Pfizer, he has built and scaled cloud‑first analytics platforms and AI‑enabled decision capabilities that help R&D and clinical supply operations leaders manage risk, complexity, and execution at global scale. Ashish brings a pragmatic, enterprise perspective on applying advanced analytics and AI to improve clinical trial reliability, speed, and operational resilience.

Martin Canwell is a Senior Account Manager at Aptean Respond, where he works closely with financial services organisations to help them modernise and strengthen their complaints management operations. In his role, Martin supports customers in extracting maximum value from Aptean Respond’s complaints management platform, with a strong focus on regulatory compliance, operational efficiency and customer experience improvement.

Martin has extensive experience advising firms on how to apply emerging technologies, such as AI‑enabled capabilities, to reduce manual effort, improve consistency, and enhance decision‑making across the end‑to‑end complaints lifecycle. He works with organisations navigating increasing complaint volumes, complex regulatory expectations and growing demands for faster, fairer customer outcomes.

At this event, Martin will share practical insights into how AI can be effectively deployed in complaints management, helping firms balance automation with control, transparency and regulator confidence while delivering better experiences for customers.

Rosie Franca is the Head of Customer Experience for Commercial Mid-Market for the Midlands & East of England. Prior to that, she was responsible for Performance Management in London & South East.

Since joining NatWest in 2015, Rosie has held roles in Business Banking, Entrepreneurship, Affluent Banking, and Corporate & Commercial Banking.

Prior to that, Rosie lived in Australia for 10 years, where she led teams in Retail & Small Business Banking; and held Relationship Management roles in Commercial Banking – including Real Estate Finance, Charities and Not- for-Profit Sectors.

Rosie holds a MBA from the University of York, and a BSc (Hons) in Nutrition from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). She also holds qualifications in Senior Leadership & Fintech from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Rosie is a Fellow of Leadership Western Australia (FLWA).

Joanna Calvert is a Senior Programme Manager within the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Leading initiatives within in the NIHR Industry Hub, she facilitates a coordinated national system that provides a single point of entry for trial feasibility and activation. Her focus is on delivering a faster, more reliable experience for global partners, ensuring the UK operates as one of the most attractive and dependable environments for commercial research.

Pranav Pandya is the Process Engineering Manager for the MSAT team at Sharp Sterile, with seven years of experience in pharmaceutical manufacturing. He has been with the company since 2018, where he has been closely involved in low-loss design processes and has developed strong expertise as a subject matter expert in low-volume sterile fills.

His work has focused on optimizing processes in GMP environments, improving efficiency, and ensuring reliable outcomes when working with limited quantities of drug substance. In this presentation, he shares key insights from that experience, with a focus on important considerations and best practices for low-volume manufacturing

Vijay Devarapalli is a Principal Product Manager at Ericsson Enterprise and is responsible for the infrastructure components of Private Cellular Networks products. Vijay is a Telecom industry veteran having designed and built 3G and LTE packet core, Edge Computing, and solutions for improving radio network efficiency. He has also made significant contributions in the Internet and Telecom standards space, having authored 17 RFCs in the IETF and numerous contributions to 3GPP LTE specifications.

Kirstin Sym-Smith is the Ericsson Global Head of Business Development for 5G Mining. She is a seasoned sales and business development leader with over 25 years in telecommunications. Kirstin has deep experience in both 4G/5G cloud-based private wireless solutions and federal government industries, receiving enterprise sales awards for mining and DoD spectrum solutions. She has an MBA from the Owen School of Management at Vanderbilt University.

Nachiket Deshpande is CEO of Impetus Technologies. With over three decades of experience across leading technology organizations, Nachiket brings an extensive understanding of how innovation and execution come together to fuel enterprise success. Prior to Impetus Nachiket was COO and President of LTI Mindtree’s AI business division. He was instrumental in leading the merger integrations effort for the merger between LTI and Mindtree, the largest integration in the industry to date.

Preceding this tenure, he held several prominent leadership roles at Cognizant, building the company’s Banking and Financial Services business and developing its global capabilities across data, cloud and AI.