IVI Staff

Prof. Markus Helfert, Director, IVI, Maynooth University

Markus Helfert is the Director of IVI and Professor of Digital Service Innovation at Maynooth University. He is also Director of the Business Informatics Group at Maynooth University. He is a Principle Investigator at Lero – The Irish Software Research Centre and at the Adapt Research Centre. His research is centred on Digital Service Innovation, Smart Cities and IoT based Smart Environments and includes research areas such as Service Innovation, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Smart Services, Building Information Management, FinTech, Data Value, Enterprise Architecture, Technology Adoption, Analytics, Business Process Managem ent. Prof. Helfert is an expert in Data Governance Standards and is involved in European Standardisation initiatives. Markus Helfert has authored more than 200+ academic articles, journal and book contributions and has presented his work at international conferences. Helfert has received national and international grants from agencies such as European Union (FP7; H2020), Science Foundation Ireland and Enterprise Ireland, was project coordinator on EU projects, and is the Project coordinator of the H2020 Projects: PERFORM on Digital Retail.

Paul Heynen

Paul has been working with IVI as operations manager since its formation in 2006. Paul is responsible for the non-research business operations functions in IVI including community, member and partner engement, financial administration, liaison with central university administrative functions, and on-going management and development of IVI-specific IT systems and platforms. Prior to joining IVI, Paul worked in the semiconductor industry for 11 years in various engineering and management roles, most recently as a product manager for an advanced process control software and analytics start-up.

Carol Connolly

Carol is a senior administrator with IVI coordinating event and outreach management, workshop coordination, digital media communication and day-to-day operations.

Prof. Piero Formica

Professor Piero Formica started his career as an economist at the OECD Economic Prospects Division in Paris, then moving to academic institutions. Professor Formica is Founder of the International Entrepreneurship Academy and was Professor of Economics with a special focus on innovation and entrepreneurship at the Jönköping International Business School in Sweden.

Prof Piero Formica is a Senior Research Fellow with the Innovation Value Institute of Maynooth University in Ireland. He is a Guest Professor at the Contamination Lab of the University of Padua and the Business School Esam in Paris. He is also an Advisor of the Cambridge Learning Gateway.

Professor Formica is a Councilor of the World Certificate Institute, a global certifying body that grants credential awards to individuals as well as accredits courses of organizations, and member of the International Advisory Panel of Amrita Center for Responsible Innovations and Sustainable Enterprises (ARISE), Amrita University, India, the Entovation Knowledge Management Network, and IKED (the International Organisation for Knowledge Economy and Enterprise Development).

Professor Formica received several awards and honors that include a Honorary Professor bestowed by the University of Mar del Plata (Argentina), a Guest Professor at King Saud University (Saudi Arabia) and at Curtin University of Technology, Curtin Business School (Perth, WA); a Special International Professor of Knowledge Economics and Entrepreneurship at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (China); an International Professor of Knowledge Economics and Entrepreneurship at the Higher Colleges of Technology, United Arab Emirates; a Senior Research Fellow of the Enterprise Research and Development Centre Business School at the  University of Central England in Birmingham; a Visiting Professor of Knowledge Economics and Entrepreneurship at the Jean Monnet Faculty of Political Studies (Second University of Naples, Italy); a member of the Advisory Council of  the Institute for Enterprise and Innovation at the University of Nottingham, and a member of the Board of Governors of the University of Bologna, Italy, where he held the professorship of Economics of Innovation in the Masters of Business Law and Technology Management.

In 2017, Professor Formica received the Innovation Luminary Award “for his outstanding work on sustained contributions to entrepreneurial research, development of the Experimental Labs approach and advocating for an Innovation Renaissance”. The Innovation Luminary Award Academy was founded in collaboration between the European Commission supported Open Innovation Strategy and Policy Group (OISPG) and Dublin City Council.

Professor Formica serves as board member of Industry & Higher Education; the International Journal of the Knowledge Economy; the International Journal of Social Ecology and Sustainable Development; the Journal of Global Entrepreneurship Research; the South Asian Journal of Management; and Frontiers in Education. He writes for the digital edition of Harvard Business Review.

Professor Formica has extensively published in the fields of knowledge economics, entrepreneurship and innovation. His published works include: The Experimental Nature of New Venture Creation: Capitalizing on Open Innovation 2.0 (Springer, 2013), co-edited with Professor Martin Curley (former VP Intel Co.), Stories of Innovation for the Millennial Generation: The Lynceus Long View (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), The Role of Creative Ignorance: Profile of Pathfinders and Path Creators (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Grand Transformation towards an Entrepreneurial Economy: Exploring the Void (Emerald Group Publishing, 2015), Entrepreneurial Renaissance: Cities Striving Towards an Era of Rebirth and Revival (Springer, 2017), Exploring the Culture of Open Innovation: Towards an Altruistic Model of Economy (Emerald Group Publishing, 2018), Innovation and the Arts: The Value of Humanities Studies for Business (Emerald Group Publishing, 2020), ECONAISSANCE: The Reimagined School and the Culture of Entrepreneurialism (Emerald Group Publishing, 2020), Nature’s Voice: Health and Humanities (bioGraph, 2020), and IDEATORS. Their Words and Voices (Emerald Group Publishing, 2022).

Dr. Zohreh Pourzolfaghar

Zohreh Pourzolfaghar is Assistant Professor for the School of Business in Maynooth University. She is a members of Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software. Zohreh formerly has been Research Fellow at Innovation Value Institute (IVI), Maynooth University’s digital transformation research centre. She is a senior research member of the Business Informatics Group. She is the theme lead in a project investigating the application of Enterprise Architecture in Smart Cities, funded by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). She has been Principle Investigator for an Industry Fellowship Programme, funded by SFI. Zohreh presented her work at international conferences and has published research in Journals and Conference Proceedings. Zohreh is also leading research within the Cost Action CA16222 (WISE-ACT), a European-wide network.  She has been thematic lead in a successful European Marie Curie PERFORM project. She is a member of the supervisory board of the EU project PERFORM, that focuses on Digital Retail. She has been awarded the SFI industry fellowship (2018) working with industry on topics related to Smart Cities and Building Information Management. She is the Co-PI for submitted H202 Techland proposal. Zohreh received her Ph.D. in Project Management in design process of building projects. Zohreh has years of experience working with project-oriented construction companies to improve organisatioanal productivity and their work processes.

Dr Marco Alfano

Dr. Marco Alfano is a Senior Researcher at the Innovation Value Institute (IVI), Maynooth University, and leader of the IVI Digital Health research cluster. He is also affiliated with Lero, the SFI Research Centre for Software, and receives SFI funding for his research. He is currently working on responsible use of AI in health and well-being by facilitating person/patient empowerment and seamless communication within the healthcare system (http://cohealth.ivi.ie/). His research interests include Responsible AI, Digital Health Transformation, Patient Empowerment, Human-machine communication, Data analytics, Semantic Web, Smart cities, Cybersecurity, and Open Data/Big Data. He has authored more than fifty peer reviewed articles for journals, books, and conferences. He has participated in several European projects and has received grants from international bodies, such as the European Union (under the FP7 and H2020 framework programs), and national bodies, such as Science Foundation Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, and the National Research Council of Italy.

Dr Adegboyega Ojo

Adegboyega Ojo is Associate Professor of Management and Government Information Systems at Maynooth University School of Business. Before his appointment at Maynooth University, he was Senior Research Fellow and Head of the E-Government Unit at Insight Centre for Data Analytics, Data Science Institute, National University of Ireland Galway. He is also Visiting Professor of Applied Informatics at Gdansk University of Technology, Poland. His expertise is in the areas of open data strategies and infrastructures, data-intensive public services, e-government Services, infrastructure and governance of smart cities.

Dr Edgar Galvan

Dr. Edgar Galvan leads the IVI Machine Learning Cluster and is a Senior Researcher in the Department of Computer Science, Maynooth University. Prior to this, he held multiple research positions in Essex University, University College Dublin, Trinity College Dublin and INRIA Paris-Saclay.  He is an expert in the properties of encodings, such as neutrality and locality, in Genetic Programming as well as a pioneer in the study of Semantic- based Genetic Programming. His research interests also include applications to combinatorial optimisation, games, software engineering and deep neural networks. Dr. Edgar Galvan has independently ranked as one of the all-time top 1% researchers in Genetic Programming, according to University College London.  He has published in excess of nearly 70 peer-reviewed publications. Edgar has over 1,900 citations and a H-index of 25.

Dr Joe Timoney

Dr Joe Timoney joined the Dept. of Computer Science at Maynooth University in 1999. He teaches on undergraduate programs in Computer Science and in Music Technology. His research interests are based in the areas of Software Engineering and Audio signal processing, with a focus on musical applications. He has supervised a number of PhD students. In 2003 he spent a 3- month research visit at ATR laboratory in Kyoto, Japan, and in 2010 to the College of Computing at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He also is a keen DIY electronics enthusiast and has built a number of electronic instruments.

Professor Brian Donnellan

Professor Brian Donnellan is Vice President of Research and Innovation, and Professor of Management Information Systems at Maynooth University.

Previous senior management positions in Maynooth University include  Vice President of Engagement and Innovation, Vice President and Dean of International Affairs and Academic Director of the Innovation Value Institute. He is active researcher in four Science Foundation Ireland research centres.

A native of County Clare, he graduated from University of Limerick with a B. Engineering in Electronic Engineering, an MBA and PhD (Computer Science and Information Systems). Prior to becoming an academic, Brian spent 19 years working in the IT industry, where he was responsible for Computer-Aided-Engineering for New Product Development.

Dr Hao Wu

The research on Architecture research at Computer Science Department aims to formalise/generalise architecture models, create automated tools and domain specific languages for manipulating different kinds of models at enterprise level. In particular, we are currently using our unique techniques for solving complex constraints to increase confidence in using Architecture models.

Dr Viviana Bastidas

Viviana Bastidas is a research associate in the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIC), at the University of Cambridge. Her career interests are in the intersection of business and information technologies in the context of urban planning and smart cities. She is a research collaborator of the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) and the Enterprise Architecture and Formal Modelling (EAFM) research group, at Maynooth University. Viviana’s research has been published in conferences and journals in the domains of the Business and Information Systems Engineering, Knowledge Economy, Digital Transformation, Internet of Things, and System Science.

Dr Fabiano Pallonetto

Dr Patrick Rigot-Müller

Dr. Patrick Rigot-Müller is a lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain at Maynooth University School of Business. His research interests include Maritime Transport, Supply Chain Digitalization and Sustainability. He has previously worked for Normandy Business School and Newcastle University (School Of Marine Science and Technology). He has published articles in conferences and peer-reviewed academic journals such as, Transportation Research Part A, Energy Policy or Technological Forecasting and Social Change.

He has delivered graduate and executive education courses for more than 10 years for many institutions such as Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne, HEC Paris, Imperial College London, ESSEC, Ecole Centrale Paris, and Ecole des Ponts ParisTech.

He has an extensive industry background with more than 20 years of consulting in Supply Chain and applied research in Digital Manufacturing. His projects covered the areas of industrial strategy, logistics strategy, network design, shipping plan optimization, outsourcing, warehouse operations, forecasting and S&OP process design, investment analysis, production plant and warehouse design… for a wide range of companies and organizations such as Total, L’Oréal, Solvay, Nespresso, Lexmark, Sephora, Alcatel-Lucent, Ministère de la Défense, Ministère des Transports, Novartis, Veolia, Vallourec, Essilor and Renault.

Dr Emmanuel Kypraios

Emmanuel Kypraios is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Management at Maynooth University School of Business.

My research interests lie at the intersection of economic sociology, sociology of finance, organization theory and strategic management, with particular focus on sustainability and the socio-cognitive mechanisms that underlie decision-making processes.

His previous academic appointment was visiting Professor of Strategy at the Ecole Hoteliere in Lausanne, Switzerland. Emmanuel earned his PhD at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)/University of Lugano, Switzerland. He studied at Johns Hopkins University, MD, USA and holds a MSc (Financial Management) from SOAS, University of London, UK, and a BA (Economics) from Bard College, NY, USA.

Before joining academia, Dr. Kypraios spent 12 years in the financial industry as a senior trader and broker of equity derivatives working for different financial institutions such as BNP Paribas, Hypovereinsbank, hedge fund groups such as Integrated Asset Management and wealth management companies in Munich, Frankfurt, London, Paris and lately in Lugano, Switzerland.

Dr Mansoor Ahmed

Dr Mansoor Ahmed did his M. Sc in Information Management from Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria. He was awarded Higher Education Commission (HEC) scholarship for higher studies (PhD) in Austria. In 2009, he completed his PhD degree from TU Wien, Austria.In 2010-2011 he was awarded Senior researcher fellowship scholarship by Indiana University, USA for his Postdoctoral studies. During this period, he worked in Web Science Lab (WSL).  In 2017, he worked as Senior researcher in University College Dublin (UCD).He is member of Editorial Review Board of many International Journals. He is also serving as Associate editor of IEEE Access. Besides this, he has organized number of workshops and also serves as Technical Program Committee member in International reputed conferences. He is also reviewer of good quality journals i.e., Elsevier and Springer. His research interest includes Data Provenance, Blockchain, Semantic Web technologies, Knowledge-based systems, Privacy issues in Health care data, Cloud Computing Security, Information Security and Privacy. He has over 12 years of teaching and research experience.

Gültekin Cakir

Gültekin Cakir is a Researcher at the IVI, Maynooth University, Ireland, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow in the PERFORM European Training Network, a Horizon 2020 funded project, where he is also chair of the ESR-Committee. He was involved in various consulting projects with SMEs and has a background in Business Management, Digital Retail and Information Systems. His research interest and recent publications deal with strategic and operational challenges retailers face such as the “Retail Apocalypse“, while undergoing the digital transformation process in the industry. Currently, he is investigating the strategic barriers of assortment integration while pursuing an omnichannel retailing approach. With the help of major Austrian and Irish retailers, he explores the underlying factors and new dynamics in assortment decision-making.

Rehan Iftikhar

Rehan Iftikhar is a Research Fellow at Innovation Value Institute (IVI), Maynooth University and a part of the EU Innovative Training Network, PERFORM. His main research interests include digital retail, digital transformation and technology management. His research has appeared in various journals and conference proceedings including Journal of Global Information Management, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization and Journal of General Management.

Douglas Cirqueira

Douglas Cirqueira is a PhD Student at Dublin City University and a Marie Curie Training Network Fellow

Claudia Roessing

Claudia Roessing is a PhD student in the Business School at Maynooth University.

Priyanka Singh

Priyanka Singh is a PhD student in the Business School at Maynooth University.

Dr Adrienne McCann

Dr Adrienne McCann is the Research Manager jointly appointed by Maynooth University and Age Friendly Ireland, enhancing the relationship between local government and academia in relation to Ireland’s Age Friendly Agenda.

Dr McCann is an Occupational Therapist having worked in the areas of rheumatology and elderly care acute settings in Northern Ireland. She previously worked on the transnational JPND and Alzheimer’s Society UK funded studies on delivering a family carer decision support intervention in long-term care settings across six countries. Additionally she worked on a CHITIN funded randomised control trial, focusing on anticipatory care planning for older adults at risk of functional decline on the island of Ireland. She is co-investigator on “Necessary discussions: Advance care planning for nursing homes in a COVID-19 outbreak” lead by Queen’s University Belfast. She previously lectured on the MSc Professional Nursing Programme at Queen’s University Belfast on Evidence Based Nursing and Dementia modules. Her research interests include older adults, ageing, palliative care and chronic illness.

Stephanie Lewellen

Stephanie Lewellen is a part-time and remote PhD student at Maynooth University and a Product Manager in the software industry.

Dr Rajibul Hasan

Dr Rajibul Hasan is an assistant professor of marketing and programme director of MSc Marketing at Maynooth University, Ireland. At Maynooth, he teaches Digital Marketing, Social Media, Contemporary Issues in Marketing (e.g., AI in Business and Marketing, AR/VR Marketing). He is the founder of a global research and methodology platform: https://scales4research.com. He also manages an Artificial intelligence and Digital Marketing Platform Website-http://upnotion.com, where he aims to disseminate digital marketing and artificial intelligence knowledge among the members of different societies. Previously, he worked as an Assistant Professor at Rennes School of Business, France. In Rennes, he was a principal investigator of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) consumer behaviour research centre. He completed his PhD from the University of Kent, UK, in the area of marketing. He specializes in understanding digital transformation, digital marketing, artificial intelligence, consumer behaviour and innovation adoption. He has published in academic journals including Tourism Management, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Computer in Human Behaviour, and Journal of Marketing Management and Strategic Change.

Dr Ali Nazarpour

Dr. Ali Nazarpour is Assistant Professor in Management at Maynooth University School of Business. Ali has been awarded PhD in Operations and Supply Chain Management from University College Dublin, Smurfit School of Business. He earned his BSc degree in Industrial Engineering and Master’s degree in Business Administration from Iran University of Science and Technology. Prior to his PhD studies, he worked for two years in the construction sector and seven years in the automotive industry where he served as Sales Supervisor, Marketing and Sales Planning Chief, and Inventory Management Project Manager. Parallel to working in industry Ali was also engaged in teaching and research activities. His dual interests in industry and academia lead to undertaking his PhD and subsequent career as a researcher and lecturer.

Dr Shane McLoughlin

Dr Shane McLoughlin is an SFI & Dell EMC funded Post-Doctoral Researcher at LERO, NUI Maynooth. Shane examines innovation, adoption and scaling of disruptive social innovations, e.g. urban IoT, smart farming, and AVs. Shane’s completed his PhD in UCD where he examined the emerging role of ICT in social aspects to human information behaviour, in Ireland’s first eco-community. This work drew on social capital theory and found that affordances of ICT’s helped augment community member’s access and use of social capital. His current research in collaboration with Dell Technologies investigates how digital transformation of the agri-food chain can help achieve Climate Smart Agriculture in order to meet UN SDG goals. Shane is furthermore a collaborator on the SFI SPRING project concerning grant funding (award: ‘17/SPR/5319’) of industry-academic collaborations. He employs a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods in his research and has lectured on socio-cultural and economic aspects of ICT, Human Information Behaviour, HCI, Social Computing & more recently Innovation theory and methodologies.

Nathan Phipps O’Neill

Nathan started his BSc. Robotics and Intelligent Devices in Maynooth 2016, where he learned essential agile frameworks for continuous and effective software development. There, he was a team member of RoboÉireann; the university’s robot soccer team who competed internationally in Sydney 2019. Around that same time, he had also become a Research Intern at IVI where he practiced security auditing and software development for IVI’s services. Before completing his studies at Maynooth, he spearheaded a project which succeeded in improving the existing whistle detection accuracy of the soccer playing robots by 12%.

Following his undergraduate studies, Nathan started an MEng. Electronic and Computer Engineering at DCU. There, he studied the topical areas such as Device Manufacturing, Data Analysis and Machine Learning, Entrepreneurship among others. A years-long research and development effort lead him to create a wearable, navigational device which used binaural audio to direct the user to their location. Nathan’s artefact could effectively output accurate directional information for navigation, especially useful for pedestrians and cyclists in urban environments.

Now, Nathan is the Lead Engineer at IVI, providing technical input and developing data analytics solutions for retail and researching data transparency within electric vehicles

Peter Mooney

Peter Mooney is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Maynooth University, Ireland. Having received his PhD in Computer Science from Maynooth University Peter moved away from academia and worked for over 10 years as a Research Fellow with the Environmental Protection Agency Ireland specialising in open data access for scientific, environmental and geospatial data at national and European levels. He returned to academia and took up his current post in 2016. Peter’s main areas of research lie at the intersection of Computer Science and Geocomputation with particular emphasis on applying computational models and approaches to working with volunteered, user generated, and citizen collected geospatial data and information. In recent years his work and that of his research group has broadened and expanded to include smart farming, the integration of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in problems within the geocomputation domain, and computational/AI processes within circular economy transformations. Peter is a passionate advocate and educator for the widespread use of open data, open science and open-source software and has been consistently actively involved with the FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geomatics), OpenStreetMap and open geodata communities globally for many years.

Dr Martin Curley

Martin Curley is Director of the Digital Academy and Open Innovation at the Health Service Executive (HSE), helping enable the digital transformation of Ireland’s health service. Most recently Martin was Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the HSE. Prior to joining the HSE Martin was Senior Vice President and group head for Global Digital Practice at Mastercard. Previously Martin was vice president at Intel Corporation and Director/GM of Intel Labs Europe, Intel’s network of more than 50 research labs which he help grow across the European region. He also served as a senior principal engineer at Intel Labs Europe leading Intel’s research and innovation engagement with the European Commission and the broader European Union research ecosystem. Prior to this Martin was Global Director of IT Innovation and Director of IT Strategy and Technology at Intel. Earlier in his Intel career, he held a number of senior positions for Intel in the United States and Europe. He also worked in research and management positions at GE in Ireland and Philips in the Netherlands.

Fiona Lynch

Dr Marija Bezbradica

Prior to coming to DCU, I obtained a BSc and MSc at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (ETF), Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Serbia. My research areas are interdisciplinary and include complex system modelling, specifically Cellular Automata (CA) and Agent Based Models (ABM), data analytics, applied mathematics, statistics as well as high performance computing (HPC) and distributed systems.

My past research includes building stochastic models of in vitro drug delivery systems (DDS) by using CA and ABM, in collaboration with Sigmoid Pharma Ltd. My interests also cover HPC optimisations of large-scale models in collaboration with the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC). Since I became a member of DCU, I was involved in lecturing and tutoring of a number of courses for undergraduate and postgraduate students covering statistical data analysis, quantitative methods, probability and statistics, and operating systems.

Donal Fitzpatrick

Gabriel Hogan

Gabriel Hogan is an IP Manager at the Science Foundation Ireland and a part-time PhD candidate.

Michael Hanley

Michael is involved in IVI’s academic education and professional training & certification programmes. Since 2011, IVI has trained more than 8000 professionals globally, helping organisations digitally transform using IVI’s Capability Maturity Framework. More recently he co-created the MSc in Digital Healthcare Transformation hosted in UL, and ReThink|ReDesign – Maynooth University’s SME digital transformation initiative, supported by Enterprise Ireland’s innovation voucher scheme. In early 2022 he successfully completed a pilot Future Workforce Skills Development Programme for a large public sector organisation. He created the course using an innovative approach he calls Design Thinking for Teaching & Development (DT4TD).

Michael has an MSc in Education & Technology, and he is a Fellow of the Irish Institute of Training and Development.

He will complete his Doctorate in Education Leadership in 2023. His doctoral thesis concerns the impact of digital transformation and disruptive innovation on Irish higher education institutions’ future strategy, business models, and value propositions.

Dr Beatrice Heneghan

Dr Beatrice Heneghan is Director of ICT at NUI Galway with responsibility for delivering transformative ICT for the enablement of impactful research, innovation and teaching in an enhanced student learning environment. In her prior role Beatrice served as Head of Information Systems and Innovation at Mayo County Council. Previously, she held posts in ICT and Digital Transformation in Laois and Limerick local authorities.

Beatrice served as Chair of the local government sectoral Architecture and Standards Group (ASG) and on the national ePlanning and Central Data Unit boards. She is a member of Lero – the Science Foundation Ireland Software Research Centre, the Maynooth University Business Informatics Research Group and the Innovation Value Institute (IVI). She is also a member of the International Advisory Board for the Professional Doctorate in Engineering programme at the University of Limerick and contributes as a guest lecturer to the programme. In 2021 Beatrice received the IVI Leadership in Digital Transformation in the Public Sector award.

While having wide experience in the Information Systems (IS) field her particular expertise is in the area of data governance and enterprise architecture with a focus on business/IT alignment in the design and delivery of strategy. Beatrice holds a doctorate in engineering from the University of Limerick and master’s in software engineering from NUI Galway. Beatrice has presented at national and international academic and practitioner conferences and continues to collaborate on research in IS.