Meet the Team

Professor Paul O’Brien
Chief Executive Officer and Director

Professor Paul O’Brien

Chief Executive Officer & Director

Professor Paul O’ Brien was appointed CEO of ELAROS 24/7 in April 2012. Paul has held senior posts in the private sector (Chief Executive), local government (Chief Officer), health (Director in West Essex NHS Trust) and education (Head of Department).

He has previous venture start-up experience having established the Essex Development and Regeneration Agency with a turnover of £8.5 million and funds under management of £15 million – employing 60 planners, economists, surveyors, bid writers and fund managers.

He has extensive experience of public sector transformation having externalised a local government service and more recently the externalisation of a £33 Million NHS Service.

Paul also has broad non-executive board experience gained over a 15 year period and has completed the Institute of Directors Diploma in Company Direction.

He is a visiting lecturer to the University of Surrey on its MBA & MSc Entrepreneurship programmes.

Peter Cunliffe
Finance Director

Bio

Peter Cunliffe

Finance Director

Peter Cunliffe qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1983, having trained in Birmingham with one of the then ‘Big 4’ accountancy firms, Deloitte Haskins and Sells.

Since qualifying, Peter has worked in various finance and accounting roles for a wide spectrum of businesses, both in terms of size (£3m up to £1.2bn turnover) and industry sector (including retail, engineering, steel stockholding, laboratory analysis and specialty chemicals).

His early positions were in large blue-chip companies, roles which gave him a full understanding of the importance of pertinent, current management information and the need for strict financial disciplines to augment performance and safeguard assets.

Recognising that most small companies do not need a full-time financial director, Peter set up Flex FD Ltd in 2004, providing a flexible financial direction service for start-up and early-stage companies, particularly in the life science and healthcare sectors, and has helped raise £7m in funding across 10 businesses.

Román Rocha Lawrence
Director of Research
& Development

Bio

Román Rocha Lawrence

Director of Research & Development

Román Rocha Lawrence joined ELAROS in July 2019 as our Graduate Research & Development Manager after graduating from The University of Sheffield with a First Class Honours MEng Degree in Bioengineering.

As part of his degree which drew on various engineering disciplines, management, science and medicine, Román specialised in Biomaterials, Tissue Engineering, Medical Devices and Computational Medicine; completing a summer research project with INSIGNEO in 2018; Europe’s largest research institute dedicated entirely to the development, validation, and use of in silico medicine technologies.

Román made a substantial impact at ELAROS in his first year using his broad depth of knowledge of interdisciplinary STEM subjects and entrepreneurial experience outside of academia, forming key partnerships for the company at an early stage and managing two pivotal Innovate UK funded projects for ELAROS.

Román has led on the development and nationwide adoption of the (digital) C19-YRS with ELAROS’ industrial, academic, and clinical partners and will be responsible for increasing the uptake of the system by patients and healthcare organisations in the NHS and private sector.

Oscar Petherick
Research & Development Manager

Bio

Oscar Petherick

Research & Development Manager

Oscar joined ELAROS in July 2021, following the completion of the University of Sheffield’s multidisciplinary MEng Bioengineering degree.

Appointed to the role of Graduate Research and Development Associate, Oscar worked across all aspects of the development of the C19-YRS, which was quickly gaining traction amongst NHS Long COVID clinics. During this time, he worked with the team to garner and convert interest in the system as well as designing and testing new features, creating materials for marketing, and instructing users.

In April 2022 Oscar was promoted to the role of Research and Development Manager. In this role he acts as Project Manager for ELAROS Innovate UK Project, Neu-Restore, which will deliver a new way to assess and monitor stroke rehabilitation. Oscar continues his work in the development of the C19-YRS, which is now embedded in the landscape of Long COVID assessment and research. Additionally, he oversees ELAROS’ hydration product portfolio and will play a key role in the development of new ELAROS systems, which are set to roll out in 2023.

Henry Robinson
Regulatory Affairs and IT Manager

Bio

Henry Robinson

Regulatory Affairs & IT Manager

In July 2022, Henry began in the new role of Regulatory Affairs and IT Manager. In this role he will ensure that Elaros and its products conform to the highest regulatory standards, and that our IT systems are secure for both staff and customers. He will bring his experiences in areas such as data processing, data protection, data ethics, and project management to this new role.

Henry started at Elaros as a part time intern in March 2021 whilst completing his master’s degree in Healthcare Analytics and Artificial Intelligence at Sheffield Hallam University. After completing his master’s degree in January 2022, he transitioned to a full time role as our Business and Healthcare Analyst. In this role he supported the rollout and development of the C19-YRS system, and became heavily involved with our partner company Mi-Trial.

Before joining Elaros, Henry graduated with honours in BSc Biochemistry from the University of Sheffield and worked as Laboratory Technician for a medical devices company. This degree included teaching in genetics, bioinformatics, microbiology, and genomics. Henry has also completed a PGCE in Secondary Science at the University of Manchester.

Dr Tom Richards
Scientific Director of
Neu-Restore

Bio

Dr Tom Richards

Scientific Director of NeuRestore

Dr Thomas Richards joined Elaros in 2022 as Scientific Director of the Neu-Restore platform. He studied a BSc in Medical Science (2014) followed by a PhD in neurophysiology (2018) at the University of Leeds. During his doctoral studies, he worked both in research, studying motor control pathways, and in education, demonstrating practical laboratory skills to undergraduates. He has also worked closely with Memorial University in St Johns, Canada, where he seconded in order to conduct experiments on a collaborative project.

Thomas’s main focus of study has been the physiology of motor control pathways, towards the goal of improving personalised therapies for conditions such as stroke, spinal cord injury, and cerebral palsy. He has worked with several different programming languages in order to apply a range of signal processing, statistical, and clustering techniques with which has developed a number of analysis pipelines.

Whilst working at Leeds Institute of Data Analytics (LIDA) from 2019-2021, he also worked on projects studying prescription patterns of inhalers across the COVID-19 pandemic and agent-based models to which would integrate live to data in order to model movement of people around a building.

At Elaros, he is implementing the skills and knowledge he has accrued towards Neu-Restore, a stroke-management platform and assessment, which aims to create the gold standard for stroke management and diagnostics.

Oliwia Zwara
Intern

Bio

Oliwia Zwara

Intern

Oliwia was selected to join the company’s summer placement programme whilst completing her University of Sheffield’s MEng Bioengineering degree.

Whilst specialising in Biomaterials and Tissue Engineering, the degree also offered her exposure to fields like computer science, medicine and material science as well as industry focused project management.

Having worked on designing and manufacturing a thermal cycler for COVID-19 testing and hearing about the Elaros’ C19-YRS app and clinical portal, it seemed like the perfect collaboration.

Over her time at the company she has worked on different aspects of the C19-YRS including the commercialisation and implementation, as well as the resource research for www.c19-yrs.me and Elaros’ most recent project, Neu-Restore.

Bárbara Silva Passadouro
PhD Researcher

Bio

Bárbara Silva Passadouro

PhD Researcher

Bárbara is a MRC DiMeN funded PhD student at the University of Leeds interested in the neurophysiology of chronic pain in Long COVID. She graduated with a First-Class Honours BSc Neuroscience with Industrial Experience degree from the University of Manchester.

As part of her final year academic research project, she joined the University of Manchester’s Human Pain Research Group to investigate brain activity in chronic pain patients, which prompted her interest in pain research.

She first got involved with ELAROS’ work on the C19 YRS app in her Research Assistant in Rehabilitation Medicine role at the Leeds Institute of Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Medicine.

She is now working together with the ELAROS team to create a platform for her PhD study that aims to measure pain symptoms and assess the impact of chronic pain in individuals with Long COVID.

Owain Medford
PhD Researcher

Bio

Owain Medford

PhD Researcher

Owain is currently a PhD student in Electronic and Electrical Engineering at the University of Huddersfield after graduating with a First Class BEng (Hons) in Electronic and Electrical Engineering.

In addition to general engineering principles and the generation and manipulation of electrical power, his undergraduate degree also covered the implementation of electronics, computer programming and embedded systems. During this time, he specialised in the use of IoT devices as remote measurement and monitoring tools for organisations to improve user quality of life.

Utilising ELAROS’ expertise in healthcare technology development, strong links with the NHS and hydration-focused academics at other partner institutions, Owain works to develop Internet of Things (IoT) devices and studies their use for improving hydration monitoring.

James McMunn
Software Developer

Bio

James McMunn

Software Developer

James has worked for 20+ years around a broad set of technologies and across a wide range of sectors, including; Health, Insurance, Finance, and Travel (The British Library, Jet2 and Confused.com).

James has worked on complex software projects, from building databases, assessing security risks, streamlining backend code to building cloud infrastructure.

Over the past four years James has been working with ELAROS on a range of health apps and on a web based health commissioning platform.

James is the lead software developer for the Mi-Trial and Neu-Restore platforms.

Pipe & Piper
Software Development Partners

Bio

Pipe&Piper

Software Development Partners

Pipe&Piper Ltd is ELAROS’ long-term strategic technology development partners who we have worked with for a number of years to help bring ELAROS’ ideas into reality.

It is through ELAROS’ first product, the Digital Bladder Diary, which P&P helped to rapidly develop the C19-YRS system into world-leading, award-winning, long Covid assessment and management platform which has been taken up by a significant portion of the United Kingdom and internationally.

Pipe&Piper provide cross platform mobile application design, cloud software development and web design services focused on delivering high-end bespoke digital business solutions right here from our Sheffield based offices. We love cloud and mobile technology, it’s something that we as a team have an abundance of passion for! We use this tied with our experience to provide our customers with something that’s incredibly unique and that is guaranteed to fulfil their digital requirements.