Team

Jon’s first industrial challenge was to develop the first annular array multiplane transesophageal echocardiography (MPTEE) probes for adult and pediatric 3D ultrasound imaging at Vingmed Sound in the early 90’s. In 1994, Jon joined Medistim and launched their products for quality assurance of coronary bypass procedures (CABG/OPCAB) in Europe and Japan. After securing the FDA 510(k) clearance for these devices, he moved to Minneapolis (MN, USA) in 2000 and built the initial Medistim US commercial effort in a joint-venture with the cardiac surgery division of Medtronic. Medistim completed a successful IPO at the Oslo Stock Exchange in 2004.

After joining AtriCure in 2005, he moved back to Europe to restructure AtriCure’s European sales & marketing activities. During this effort, he initiated AtriCure’s European surgical training program in Barcelona, Spain, which since then has trained several hundred European cardiac surgeons in open and closed chest atrial fibrillation surgery. He also supported the first-in-patient clinical trial of the AtriClip, the first surgical left atrial appendage (LAA) closure device, at the University Hospital of Zürich, Switzerland.

Over the years since 2008, Jon headed and co-founded two early-stage interventional cardiology companies (Miracor Medical SA and CorFlow Therapeutics AG). These catheter-based technologies attempt to solve one of the most challenging problems in interventional cardiology: the diagnosis and improvement of the coronary microcirculation after a coronary stent procedure in acute heart attack patients (STEMI). Jon contributed to bringing these Class III technologies from the idea stage to clinical trials and regulatory approvals including the FDA Breakthrough Device Designation (BDD) for the CorFlow technology. His last responsibility was as Senior Business Solution Manager at Zühlke Engineering, a Swiss contract developer of medical and pharma solutions including connected health and artificial intelligence products.

Jon is the inventor and co-inventor of 14 patents and the author of multiple scientific publications focussing on the coronary microcirculation. He is the founder of Cardiac Impact GmbH.
In his spare time, Jon enjoys the outdoors with his wife Caroline and loves yoga and cooking curries.

His motto is: “Quality • Persistence • Continuous Innovation”

He completed a PhD in cardiac function assessment with novel non-invasive techniques and moved forward with his research applying novel ideas into the field of Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy in both children and adults, with CRT in adults becoming the major research interest and field of work. He is currently also holding a staff position as a Cardiac Electrophysiologist at Oslo University Hospital doing ablation procedures in children and adults with congenital heart disease and implantations of ICD/CRTs.

– 31 Journalpapers listed on Pubmed
– 3 granted patents

Research funding through Eureka Eurostars, Norwegian Research Council, Norwegian South East Health Authorities, Innovation Norway, Oslo Municipal Research Funds.

– Invited Speaker at HRS/EHRA/APHRS/AEPC on multiple occasions.
– Lecturer/Consultant Abbott, Medtronic.

Mohammad Albatat received his MSc Degree in Physics and Engineering in Medicine from University College London (UCL) in 2015. Passionate about medical technology, after one year of clinical engineering experience, the move to research and development was a natural fit to pursue his full potential as an engineer. He started a role as a researcher within an EU-funded multidisciplinary project, based in the Intervention Centre, Oslo University Hospital. This role provided him with the necessary means to achieve a Ph.D. degree in medical technology. His interest in cardiology led him to focus his Ph.D. research on cardiac devices, particularly cardiac rhythm management devices. He then co-founded Pacertool, working as the Chief Operating Officer.

Mohammad was responsible for creating and implementing the quality management system in the company, which is now ISO 13485 certified. As the Chief Operations Officer, he is involved in all ventures of the company with key responsibilities including overall planning, hiring, and supplier management. He is also the Project Manager of catheter development.

His motto is: “Say no to the good, so you can say yes to the best.”

He also has experience as a consultant working on the use of AI for automating well-planning processes for large energy companies, providing technical due diligence services to European investment companies in deep- and medical technology, and as a project manager at Simula developing mobile applications deploying to over a million users.

Vegard started his career as Field Technical Engineer at St. Jude Medical in 2010. He quickly became an expert within the field of electrophysiology and contributed to St. Jude Medical’s growth in Norway by providing technical and clinical support during 3D-mapping EP procedures. He continued his development by becoming a product specialist also on pacemakers, ICDs and CRTs, which earned him the title of Sr. Field Technical Engineer by 2014.

In 2016 he assumed sales responsibility for the Norwegian EP business, a position he carried over to Abbott Medical after the acquisition in 2017. During his time as Territory Manager he continued to grow the business by developing a team of Field Technical Engineers as well as delivering healthy revenue growth every year.

Vegard’s desire not just to be an expert user and to sell advanced medical technology, but also to develop it, made him resign from his position at Abbott Medical in 2021 to join Pacertool.

In his spare time, he enjoys playing the guitar and to exercise.

Maciej’s scientific journey began in Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo, in 2016, with the use of statistical shape atlases on the heart models derived from cardiac magnetic resonance images. The analysis resulted in a few publications presented in the international conferences, as well as successful defence of his master thesis in 2017. In 2018, Maciej became an MSCA fellow affiliated with King’s College London, where he collaborated closely with both clinical and industrial facilities around Europe and made significant contributions in the form of scientific publications, publicly available software applications, and computational models.

During a secondment at Hospital-Clinic in Barcelona, in 2018, working closely with the clinical researchers Maciej developed an application for data extraction, processing, and visualization as an API of EchoPAC (GE Healthcare) software. This work was used in multiple journal and conference publications regarding the basal septal hypertrophy in patients with hypertension and was awarded the best-moderated poster presentation during the prestigious European Society of Cardiology conference in 2019.

In 2019 Maciej moved back to Oslo to work as a biomedical research consultant at GE Healthcare. Along with the PhD fellows from both London and Oslo, he developed an artificial data set of over 1000 four-chamber human hearts. The models were built with high accuracy and are openly available, currently used by about 100 different cardiac research groups for detailed electrophysiological and mechanical simulations. As the consultant for GE, Maciej helped to employ the models in a novel application for automatic segmentation of echocardiography images, with numerous applications within the company’s devices.

In the meantime, since 2020, Maciej established a collaboration with the researchers from Oxford University to study the impact of the preterm birth on the heart’s anatomy and function. Moreover, along with the clinical team from Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, he studied large sets of pediatric cardiac data to describe the connection between childhood obesity and the heart’s morphology. The results from all the aforementioned research projects have been published in high-impact cardiological journals.

Maciej also actively pursued public engagement activities to inform the public about the state of modern cardiological research. Through a collaboration with the artistic studio Cellule, he presented the Big Heart Data installation (50 3D printed heart models with a digital interface of anatomical variability), at Science Gallery London, and an extended version of it (with 3D printers and different materials) at New Scientist Live! expo in London, in 2019, reaching out to about 150 000 visitors.

Maciej’s hobbies include travelling with his Fiancée Neringa, squash, ice- and roller skating, and playing board games. His ambition has always been to make the applications and tools that he is developing useful for both patients and the research community.

Solving health issues using data science has been her career goal since early in her studies, making Pacertool the perfect match.

Despite being a recent graduate, Elin has experience as a research assistant at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. There she worked on methods for filtering sensor data and curve fitting. 
Outside of work, Elin enjoys hiking, bouldering and playing the flute. She is currently playing in Sagene janitsjarkorps and has previously played in His Majesty the King’s Guard band as part of her compulsory service.

During his thesis at the University of Oslo at Computational Physics, Mathias developed a strong passion for programming and large-scale numerical simulations. This led him to begin at a small Norwegian company that worked within the Norwegian space industry, where he – among other projects – helped develop the instrument data simulator for the upcoming Sentinel-4 ESA satellite. He also assisted in creating cloud-free mosaics and measuring the glacier velocity on Greenland from satellite imagery. 
 
In his spare time Mathias enjoys climbing, programming and reading sci-fi books.

He has been the PI or served on the Steering Committee of more than 15 multi-national clinical trials. Dr. Gold sits on the editorial board of several peer-reviewed journals, including American Journal of Cardiology, JACC, JACC EP, Circulation AE, Heart Rhythm 02 and the Journal of Cardiac Electrophysiology. He is a Section Editor for Heart Rhythm and editor in chief of Current Cardiovascular Risk Reports. He is a former President of the Heart Rhythm Society and the Association of Professors of Cardiology.

He had published more than 200 manuscripts related to cardiac resynchronization therapy.

Prof. Linde is the author of more than 250 papers, reviews, and editorials in a wide variety of fields including CRT, sex and arrhythmia, hemodynamic monitoring and heart failure epidemiology and she serves on the editorial board of several journals. She is editor for the European heart Journal. She has been a board member of the European Heart Rhythm Association (EHRA) and has served on many guidelines writing committees of EHRA and the Heart Failure Association.” She was Vice President of the ESC 2018-2020 and is now the Secretary Treasurer of the ESC.

He completed his residency at Jacobi Medical Center and his fellowships in cardiovascular diseases and clinical cardiac electrophysiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, Montefiore Medical Center. He is board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine in internal medicine, cardiovascular disease, and clinical cardiac electrophysiology.

For the past 15 years, the main focus has been on start-up companies in Norway and Sweden. He combines his board positions and consulting work with a part-time engagement at Oslo Metropolitan University working with innovation infrastructure.

Tom Pike was the chairman of Vaccibody (now NyKode Therapeutics) for 11 years and currently also serves on the boards of Inven2, Vingmed Holding, Vectron Biosolutions, and Digital Life Norway. He holds a B.Sc. Honors in pharmacology and has participated in a number of educational programs in business & administration, sales & marketing, and finance.

He completed a Ph.D. in cardiac function assessment with novel non-invasive techniques and moved forward with his research applying novel ideas to the field of Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy in both children and adults, with CRT in adults becoming the major research interest and field of work.

He is currently also holding a staff position as a Cardiac Electrophysiologist at Oslo University Hospital doing ablation procedures in children and adults with congenital heart disease and implantations of ICD/CRTs.

She gained broad experience in healthcare and life sciences, covering the sector from several angles. Susanne was a management consultant in health care (public and private) and life sciences at EY, served in medical and commercial roles in the pharmaceutical industry (Novartis), and has clinical practice as a resident in oncology. She worked with Arctic Securities as an equity analyst covering the healthcare sector, before joining forces with T.D. Veen to co-found and lead p53.

Susanne has supported life science companies in different phases of development, from start-up to late clinical stage, and has experience from financial markets including private placements and IPOs.

Mona started her career as a Sales Representative with two national distributors: Gallus Plesner/KEBO and Cardiac. In Cardiac, she was hired to build the SciMed Life System product portfolio business in invasive cardiology from scratch. Mona helped and supported the university hospitals to develop this therapy. She was also involved in the cardiothoracic products, amongst other the Carbomedics heart valves and held the position as Manager the last two years of her career with Cardiac.

In 1995, SciMed Life Systems was acquired by Boston Scientific Cooperation (BSC) and Mona became SM, responsible for the overall business in Norway and Denmark. She created partnerships and collaboration in these two countries resulting in an increased PCI footprint vs CABG. BSC created a Nordic organization with a strong focus on therapy and product development in close collaboration with the invasive cardiologist.

In 2004 Mona accepted an offer from St. Jude Medical (SJM) to start its business in Norway from scratch as an SM, and later as a CM. She was responsible for CRM (pacemakers/ICDs) and invasive cardiology products. In parallel, Mona built a strong team who shared the winning spirit and ambitious targets. The rest of SJMs products within EP/AF, Cardiac Surgery, and Structural Heart were launched as well and SJM became the market leader in several of the therapy areas.
In 2013 Mona was appointed Nordic GM for Neuromodulation (NM) in parallel being CM Norway. She restructured the Nordic NM team to be more efficient with a true Nordic perspective and SJM became the market leader in all countries.

In 2017 St. Jude Medical was acquired by Abbott. Mona became the GM for NM in Northern Europe (Benelux, Nordic, and UK/IRE) and also Poland, Russia, Czech, Hungary, Greece, and Israel in the last two years. She was responsible for restructuring the organization in each country, creating a regional team, building a KOL network, developing processes to secure alignment across the region, defining and creating a winning culture, and meeting the financial targets and commitments.

Mona resigned from this position in Q2, 2021 to focus on some private projects, identify business opportunities for market growth and penetration in MedTech, and be open for project collaboration with other senior executives from MedTech/pharma and board engagements.

In her spare time, she enjoys skiing, hiking, traveling, and reading – on her own or with her husband Tom and 3 adult children.

Her motto is:
«Winning Spirit – Walk the talk – Persistence – Implementation/execution»

Børre holds a Bachelor degree from NHH (Norwegian school of Economics and Business Administration) and a degree in Building and Construction from Gothenburg Technical Institute.