The Team

Elena Ovreiu is a Senior Lecturer at both the Medical Engineering, as well as the and Electronics, Telecommunications & IT departments at University Politehnica of Bucharest, where she has introduced and currently teaches the eHealth, Innovation in Healthcare and Telemedicine courses.

Elena earned a Ph.D. in Electronics and Automation from Institute National des Sciences Appliqués (INSA), Lyon, France and has an international academic and work resumé, having done studies and research in countries such as Singapore, Israel and China. Most recently, in 2021 she was a Fellow at Rochester University (NY) on a Fulbright scholarship, focusing on entrepreneurship in an academic setting.

Additionally, Elena was appointed Personal Advisor to the Minister of Healthcare of Romania in the earlier part of 2021, with a focus on improving the safety of hospitals through the introduction of Medical Engineers. She is also the founder and president of SSIMA Re:Imagine Healthcare—Festival of Innovation in Medical Technology. This event annually attracts world leaders in the field of medical technology in academia, including from top institutions such as Harvard University, MIT, Johns Hopkins and Technion, as well as leaders from the business sector and public policy makers. Elena is a frequent guest in national media on topics related to Medical Technology, and in the past has hosted her own radio broadcast on this topic at Radio Guerrilla.

Ezri Tarazi earned his BDes in Industrial Design at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 1990. He worked in Bezalel’s R&D Department (1990-1996). Tarazi was Chair of the Industrial Design Department at Bezalel (1996-2004) and founded the Master’s Program in Industrial Design (M.Des). He co-founded the IDEO branch in Israel (1998-2002), and was a partner in several tech startups in the fields of solar energy, sustainable design, digital ink for billboards, and more. He founded d-Vision together with Keter Group (2005-2012). His work has been shown in important museums, galleries and design fairs around the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Cooper Hewitt national design museum in New York, Art and Design center Kyoto, Japan, Trienalle, Milano, Italy and more. His work has also been shown in individual and in group exhibitions, and in curated design exhibitions in many museums and galleries around the world and in Israel.

He founded Tarazi Studio, which specializes in strategic design for companies, design thinking, and design products for industry, consulting governments and municipalities around the world with innovation through Design Thinking.

Tarazi has won many national and global prizes published two books on design and design thinking and published dozens of articles in books and catalogs on design. He was a member of the Council for Higher Education and chaired the Supreme Committee for the Humanities, Arts, Education, and Pedagogy (2006-2016).

Thomas, a law-educated professional from the Netherlands, has broad experience in both the law and in finance. Thomas has been involved in multiple highly successful and sustainable businesses and programs in several countries at or soon after their conception, most of which are highly visible and have international exposure. He has worked as a legal advisor for multiple startups, including the SSIMA conference in Romania and the Tulips Ball in the Netherlands. He has also advised a British company, based in Denmark, on a case involving parallel lawsuits in both the Netherlands and the USA concerning an intellectual property dispute in the oil industry. Thomas has also worked for more than 5 years as a manager in a multinational corporation, including as a risk assurance manager involved in managing the internal control system for several accounting departments. Thomas is a Founding Director of BIOdyssey and will be managing the legal and financial aspects of the programs.