Press kit

Joanna Shields is passionate about creating responsible technology that benefits humanity, and has spent her professional life building companies, products and Platforms that have transformed markets and reshaped industries. As Chief Executive Officer, Joanna Shields leads BenevolentAI in its mission to scale the discovery of life-changing new medicines for patients. 

Joanna has spent over three decades building and growing some of the world's best-known technology companies, most recently at Facebook, Aol and Google. As a tech industry veteran, Joanna has a deep understanding of the technological and commercial innovation needed to make a transformative impact on human health. 

Since joining BenevolentAI as CEO in 2018, Joanna has accelerated BenevolentAI’s transformation from a startup to a clinical-stage AI-enabled drug discovery company. Under Joanna’s leadership, BenevolentAI has scaled and validated the Benevolent Platform™ (its AI-enabled drug discovery Platform), broadened the Company’s pipeline of Platform-generated disease programmes and developed lasting successful commercial collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies. In April 2022, Joanna successfully transitioned BenevolentAI to a publicly traded company via a merger with Odyssey Acquisition. 

Prior to joining BenevolentAI, Joanna served in the UK Government as Under Secretary of State and Minister for Internet Safety & Security, Digital Economy Adviser and Chair and CEO of TechCityUK. Joanna serves as the Co-Chair of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI), an OECD-endorsed multi-stakeholder initiative working on the trustworthy development and deployment of AI. She is the founder of the WeProtect Global Alliance, is a Life Peer of the House of Lords, a Commissioner on the Oxford Commission on AI & Good Governance (OxCAIGG), and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Ivan is Chief Operating Officer and a Co-Founder of BenevolentAI. His role guides the company’s growth, encompassing various aspects of company financing, strategy, corporate and business development, and technology commercialisation.

Ivan has nearly 20 years of experience working with early stage life science and technology companies. Prior to co-founding BenevolentAI in 2014, he spent 10 years in venture capital as an investor in early stage life science companies, considering all aspects of technology commercialisation, including company formation, business development, private and public equity financings and trade sales. In 2013, he also helped launch Genomics England Ltd, a nationwide DNA sequencing programme linking genomic data with NHS records of patients with rare disease and cancer. Ivan holds a D.Phil. in Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Oxford where he also completed a year’s post-doctoral research.

Nick is BenevolentAI’s Chief Financial Officer and is responsible for all financial activities of the company as well as investor relations.

Nick has 15 years of experience in the pharma and biotech industry. Prior to joining BenevolentAI, he was CFO of Clinigen, a UK AIM-listed global pharmaceutical and pharma services company with over £450m of revenue that was acquired by Triton PE for £1.3bn.

Nick previously spent eight years as a top-rated analyst covering the healthcare sector, initially at the investment bank Investec and then Royal Bank of Canada, where he was Managing Director and Head of the Healthcare Equity Research desk for Europe, building their healthcare equity research platform. As an analyst, Nick advised leading UK, US and EU institutional funds on investment decisions whilst also helping companies raise over £2.5bn of capital across various IPOs and equity raises to execute on growth plans, all within the healthcare space. Now as CFO, he has gone from reviewing companies and their strategies to enacting them.

He started his career as a pharmacist before moving to global biopharma GlaxoSmithKline where he completed his CIMA accountancy qualification working within R&D, Pharma and Global Manufacturing and Supply strategy.

Anne is BenevolentAI’s Chief Scientific Officer and is responsible for all aspects of drug discovery from therapeutic area selection through to target identification, building BenevolentAI’s drug discovery portfolio, and delivering candidate molecules to clinical development. She is also the Site Head for BenevolentAI’s Cambridge Laboratories. 

Anne’s key strengths focus on promoting organisational delivery and productivity. She is passionate about building high-functioning and cohesive teams with equal gender representation at every level, that are committed to delivering life-changing medicines to the clinic.

Anne has over 25 years of experience in pharma and biotech, and has worked on all stages from early discovery to late-stage drug development. Before joining BenevolentAI, Anne worked for pharma (Pfizer) and biotech (Mission Therapeutics), across a wide range of therapeutic areas including fibrosis, pain, arthritis and rheumatology, and neurodegeneration. She was Head of Pharmacology and Chief Operating Officer for Pfizer in the UK where she was responsible for the generation of primary and secondary data to support the portfolio. Anne holds a BSc and PhD in Genetics from the University of Liverpool, UK.

Daniel is BenevolentAI’s Chief Technology Officer, and is passionate about developing and delivering transformative technologies that tackle some of the most challenging problems in science. He is responsible for building and developing the Benevolent Platform™  to support the company’s mission to discover new medicines. Daniel organises and oversees the five functions in product and tech, including engineering, AI, informatics, product, and project management, guiding their work to apply machine learning and other advanced technologies to the world’s biomedical data, extracting insights from that data at scale, and enabling drug discovery scientists to make better decisions throughout target identification and drug development.

Daniel is also responsible for future innovation at BenevolentAI, including facilitating data integration at scale, information extraction and inference using multiple data modalities, and enhancing the interplay and trust between human and artificial intelligence via explainable AI and data visualisation.

Daniel has worked at the intersection of technology and biology for over 15 years. After a foundation in biomedical computation at Stanford, he worked as a technology consultant with Accenture in Silicon Valley before obtaining a Ph.D. in Switzerland at ETH Zurich in machine learning and neuroscience. He is the author of more than 40 publications and patents in research areas spanning biologically-motivated machine learning, algorithm development, and neuroscience, with over three thousand scientific articles citing his work.

Anna serves as Chief People Officer at BenevolentAI. She brings over 20 years of experience in talent acquisition, employer branding and human resources strategy, having held HR roles at Amazon, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson and the digital health company, Kry. Anna is a trained executive coach and regular speaker at global conferences on the future of work, female leadership and diversity, and has led successful change management strategies. 

At BenevolentAI, Anna oversees all things People, including talent acquisition, people partnering, learning and development and office management. Her mission is to drive a cohesive global people, culture and engagement strategy that deepens performance to accelerate value and scale and enables BenevolentAI to continue attracting top talent.