YANNIS VASILOPOULOS Role: Digital Workflow Engineer Area: Data science, Edge Computing, Machine Learning, Software Engineering Employer: Siemens, UCT Prague Language: English only    What can I help my mentee with? chemical engineering (pharmaceuticals, transport phenomena, simulations) software engineering get an insight into the corporate world

Yannis comes from Greece, where he obtained a bachelor degree in Physics and a masters degree in Chemical Engineering; during his master studies he was participating in a research program, mostly dealing with fluids and mass transfer simulations. After finishing his studies, he became a private tutor for teaching math and physics and spent a year working as a research assistant in the National Centre of Scientific Research Demokritos in Athens. He participated in a project dealing with the simulation of blood and nanoparticles flow in “digital twin” arteries. Back then, Yannis saw himself in academia so he pursued his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at UCT Prague. His work concerned the modelling of unit operations in the pharmaceutical industry, and collaborated with several researchers from academia and industry, such as the Academy of Sciences, and Zentiva.

During his free time he had been learning more about programming, data science and machine learning and realized that he would like to explore other opportunities outside academia. At the moment Yannis is employed by Siemens as a Digital Workflow Engineer. He is mostly working on Industrial Edge, the Siemens Edge Computing Platform, as well as on web applications development. The topic of industrial edge computing is at the forefront of Industry 4.0, and Yannis’ job deals with the process of leveraging data from production machines, tools, processes and plants and creating insights for optimized processes, products, and improved maintenance. 

Why does Yannis want to become a mentor? During his academic path, he felt many times lost. He thinks that if you are a Ph.D. student or a researcher in academia and you don’t collaborate with any company outside, you probably isolate yourself from the knowledge instead of expanding. “Because there might be solutions out there that people in academia don’t know about or the other way around. This picture, I think the broad picture, was unclear to me, and so was the career path.” He would like to help someone, with his knowledge and experience, that he has gained.