Sarah is an experienced business builder and executive currently acting as a strategy & operations consultant for tech start-up and growth companies.  Most recently, Sarah led Business Operations at Cohere, a Series C AI startup.  She hired and stood up new teams, platforms and processes across Sales & Partnerships, Marketing, Customer Service & Success, and Finance, as well as leading the overall corporate and GTM strategy efforts.  Prior roles included leading the data business at TMX (Canada’s largest stock exchange), and strategy & operations and sales roles at Google.  Post MBA, Sarah started her career at McKinsey & Company as a strategy consultant. Originally from Toronto, Sarah is a graduate of Princeton University and the Wharton School of Business.

Gavin Parfit has been the Chief Executive Officer of several industrial and trading companies and most recently served as Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of a railroad supply manufacturing company based in Chicago, IL USA, with operations in 14 states as well as Europe and China. Previously he was the Chief Executive Officer of a bulk liquid storage company serving the chemical industry based in New Orleans, LA USA. He also served as President and Chief Financial Officer of a privately held international conglomerate trading in steel, coal and other commodities, together with interests in manufacturing, venture capital, oil and gas, leasing, agriculture, banking, and real estate which included hotels, office and residential buildings. In that capacity he arranged a leveraged ESOP, acquired and divested subsidiaries in various industries, renegotiated numerous financing arrangements, and created operating efficiencies. Prior to the above he worked in investment banking at a major US bank in London and New York. Born in Durban, South Africa, Gavin ran an import export business before emigrating to the UK. Gavin currently serves on various boards and is an active partner in an agricultural partnership in California.

Ms. Miller is a professional engineer, executive, and corporate director with 20+ years of experience in engineering design and project management in the mining and transportation industries. Ms. Miller is currently the Vice President of Cybersecurity & Operational Technology at JDS Energy and Mining. She also serves as an Independent Non-Executive Director for Wesdome Gold Mines and OMAI Gold Mines, Canadian gold mining companies, and a Strategic Advisor at Awz Ventures Inc., a venture capital fund, and Drone Delivery Canada. For 13 years Ms. Miller worked primarily on tailings projects before transitioning to business development. She led the Business Development departments for two of the world’s largest engineering consulting firms’ Toronto offices: Bantrel with the backing of Bantrel’s parent company, Bechtel; and SNC-Lavalin’s Mining and Metallurgy. At JDS Ms. Miller has focused on building a team specialized in cybersecurity and operational technology and her team is providing these services to the resource industry. She is a strong advocate on issues pertaining to women in engineering and received the 2017 Leading Women Building Communities Award for her work in this area. Ms. Miller graduated from the University of Oxford, Saïd School of Business, with an MBA focused on finance and strategy; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a Master’s degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering (specializing in geotechnical engineering); and holds a Bachelor of Applied Science degree from the University of Toronto in Mineral and Geological Engineering.

A childhood passion for math, philosophy, electromagnetic waves, and problem-solving led Soosan Beheshti to become an electrical engineer. Her early research and studies on communication systems design piqued her curiosity and led her to consider a range of questions on data modelling for the purpose of prediction and control. This area would become the foundation of Beheshti’s research, and her models can be adapted to a broad number of machine learning applications, from medical imaging to data clustering. For Beheshti, simpler is better. “That’s modelling,” she says. In her research on statistical signal and data processing, Beheshti harnesses data for parametric modelling. To get to the underlying structure of a set of observed data, she turns to Occam’s razor law of parsimony philosophy, a 14th-century problem-solving principle that argues, “Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.” “How much we trust the data dictates the complexity of the model structure that we consider,” says Beheshti. As more data is gathered that requires a faster modelling process, her research will continue to focus on meeting the challenges related to model complexity, validity, and reliability.

Haley is a seasoned M&A specialist with over a decade of distinguished experience spanning Investment Banking, Private Equity, and Portfolio Management. Her expertise shines through her leadership in orchestrating numerous mid to large-size cross-border transactions across North America, Europe, and Asia. Moreover, Haley has played a pivotal role in guiding entrepreneurs and early-stage companies through capital raising, corporate strategy, and successful exit planning endeavors. Her track record boasts the meticulous spreadsheeting of multiple acquisitions, averaging between $500 million to $6.0 billion in enterprise value, as well as spearheading spin-offs with an average enterprise value of $3 billion. At the helm of investment management teams within both Technology and Real Estate sectors, Haley has showcased her adeptness in steering highly intellectual groups towards success. Haley is currently holding the position of Vice President of Investment and Investor Relations at a prominent Private Equity firm. She also serves on various boards and actively participates as an investor in the BlueSky Investment Club, which holds multiple trading seats in both the NYSE and Toronto Exchange. Haley's international upbringing, having been raised in Macau, Paris, Montreal, and Boston, has endowed her with fluency in English, French, Mandarin, and Cantonese. Haley is a graduate of the Cornell Johnson Business School, holding an MBA degree, with a pending CFA Level III designation on the horizon.

Heather Couture is a Machine Learning Consultant and Founder of Pixel Scientia Labs. She has two decades of experience in computer vision and machine learning, half of those with applications to pathology. She completed an MS at Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Computer Science at the University of North Carolina, where her research focused on developing deep learning methods to predict breast cancer molecular biomarkers from H&E. She has published in top-tier computer vision and medical imaging venues, writes regularly on LinkedIn, for her newsletter Computer Vision Insights, and hosts the Impact AI Podcast. As a consultant, Heather works with startups to reduce the trial-and-error of machine learning development. She makes use of the latest machine learning research to amplify their results and support their in-house team for the long term. Her mission is to fight cancer and climate change with AI – and she does that by strengthening the machine learning component of her clients’ most impactful projects.

Andrew wears many hats across the innovation ecosystem. Most recently he joined ventureLab as a Medical Device Advisor on the Founder Services team. He has also been Entrepreneur in Residence for U of T’s Medicine By Design program, where he supports the commercialization of technology in regenerative medicine and cell and gene therapy from the University and the surrounding hospitals, and a Venture Partner at LaunchIt Ventures. He comes from a science background having a PhD in Molecular Pharmacology from Roswell Park Cancer Institute and doing a short post-doc at UHN which is how he found his way to Canada. Andrew started his industry career bouncing around the innovation ecosystem, most recently at Clinical Trials Ontario, where he built an extensive clinical site network of over 400 sites across Canada and helped biotech, medical device, and digital health companies find clinical partners to run trials and pilots. His combined experience in the industry, clinical, and scientific worlds has led to an appointment in the Faculty of Medicine at UofT, where he guest lectures on topics like drug development, biotech landscape, and entrepreneurship.