About our Team

At Covanos, we pride ourselves in our strong team. The founders are leaders in the fields of interventional cardiology, biomechanical engineering, computational fluid dynamics and mathematics, who have collaborated for a decade with a shared vision for the future of computational precision medicine. Together with the senior management team, the Covanos team is highly skilled, diversified and experienced, with a broad background in academia, medicine, finance, early-stage and global pharmaceutical and technology companies.

Get in touch

For all enquiries, investment opportunities, and to learn more about the company, our products in development and our people, please do get in touch with us.

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Founders and Senior Management Team

Founder and SENIOR MEDICAL ADVISOR

Habib Samady, MD

Habib is President of the Heart and Vascular Clinical Service Line at Northeast Georgia Health System, and Director at the Georgia Cardiovascular Imaging, Biomechanical, and Machine Learning Laboratory. He is an adjunct Professor of Medicine at Emory and was Director of Interventional Cardiology for the Emory University and Emory Healthcare until December 2020. He is recognized as one of the foremost international experts in coronary physiology. He has an actively funded clinical and translational research program, is extensively published with over 350 publications and abstracts in intravascular imaging, coronary physiology, atherosclerosis assessment, and stent biomechanics and has supervised and participated in training over 60 interventional and 100 general cardiology fellows. He serves as Deputy Editor of the Journal of American College of Cardiology Cardiovascular Interventions and is a Co-Editor of a major textbook, Interventional Cardiology, 2nd Ed., McGraw Hill, 2017.

FOUNDER and Chief Technology Officer

Alessandro Veneziani, PhD

Alessandro is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Emory University and has strong experience in mathematical modeling with emphasis on cardiovascular diseases. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, and he also had collaborations with several companies for research in computational fluid dynamics. He has advised more than 15 Ph.D. students, more than 30 Master students, and several postdoctoral fellows. In 2007 he was the recipient of the “Giovanni Sacchi-Landriani International Prize” for his work on Partial Differential Equations (awarded to scholars less than age 40). His research has been acknowledged with more than 5,000 citations on Google Scholars.

chief medical officer

Mark Carlson, MD, MA

Dr. Carlson is a cardiologist and Adjunct Professor of Medicine at the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine. Dr. Carlson joined St. Jude Medical, Inc. in 2006 and served as Corporate Chief Medical Officer and Vice President, Global Clinical Affairs until its acquisition by Abbott Laboratories in 2017 for $25B. He then served as Division Vice President and Chief Medical Officer, Cardiac Arrhythmias and Heart Failure at Abbott Laboratories until 2020. Dr. Carlson received his M.D. from the University of Kansas, an M.A. in public policy from Duke University, and a B.S. in Biology from Kansas State University. He trained in internal medicine at University Hospitals of Cleveland and CWRU and in cardiology and cardiac electrophysiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University. He was professor of medicine at CWRU and his research on arrhythmias and cardiac neural control has resulted in over 200 publications. He is an inventor of five United States Patents. As a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow on Senator Orrin Hatch’s Senate Judiciary Committee, Dr. Carlson worked on the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act and the Cord Blood Stem Cell Act. Dr. Carlson served on the FDA’s Devices Dispute Resolution Panel and the NCDR ICD registry steering committee. He chaired the Heart Rhythm Society’s (HRS) Health Policy Committee, the American College of Cardiology Electrophysiology Committee, the HRS/FDA Policy Conference on Device Performance, and the HRS task force on device performance policies and guidelines and the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee.

Chief Financial Officer

Mark P. Colonnese

Mark has been a senior executive in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries for over thirty years. He has been successful in raising nearly $1 billion in public (including IPOs) and private financings. Most recently he served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Aviragen Therapeutics from November 2015 until its merger with Vaxart Inc. in February 2018. Previously, he has served as the Chief Financial Officer of several public and private biotech and diagnostic companies. He has also held executive and management positions at Schering-Plough Corporation, and served on the Board of Directors of Endeavor Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He currently is a Board Director of Bio-Path Holdings, Inc. a Nasdaq-listed biotech company. He holds an MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson University and a BS magna cum laude in Accounting from Ithaca College.

VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT

Laila Samady-Mustad, PhD

With a PhD in Molecular Pathology and Immunology from University College London (UCL), Laila is a research scientist and strategic advisor with more than 20 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical, medical, and biotechnology industry in the UK, US, and France. Her expertise is in medical affairs, partnership, business development, and capital raising strategies. She is currently a strategic advisor to a number of health-related companies in digital health and medical diagnostics. Her work at UCL led to the development of patents and a spin out company, BioVex which was acquired by Amgen in 2011 for $1B. While at Boehringer Ingelheim, she served in increasingly senior roles initially in cardiovascular medical affairs leading to a global strategic role in oncology medical affairs and Global Trial Alliance Manager. Prior to her PhD, she obtained a BSc in Biochemistry at Trinity College, Hartford, CT and MSc in Molecular and Cell Biology from Institut Pasteur, Paris.

Senior Vice President of Commercial operations

Brian Walsh

Brian is an accomplished global medical equipment industry senior executive with over 30 years’ background in general management, operations, commercial development and marketing in a variety of technologies including medical imaging at companies including Siemens Medical, Silicon Valley based ADAC Laboratories, and most recently as past President and General Manager of Dornier MedTech America responsible for North and South America operations. He has been involved in large imaging platform development initiatives in a variety of application spaces including Nuclear Medicine, PET, PACS, Radiation Therapy Planning and Cardiology Information Systems. He received a MS and BA in Bioengineering from the University of California – San Diego and an Executive MBA from Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Scientific advisory board

Chair: Spencer B. King III, MD

A pioneer in cardiac catheterization, coronary arteriography and interventional cardiology, Dr. Spencer King III was co-developer of the multi-purpose technique of coronary arteriography and has directed invasive and interventional cardiology training for more than 150 cardiology fellows.  In 1972, he became the first Director of the Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory of Emory University Hospital.  Spencer was President of the American College of Cardiology, President of the Society for Cardiac Angiography and Interventions and served as the first Chair of the Interventional Cardiology Boards of the American Board of Internal Medicine.  He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Interventions.  He is currently Chairman of the New York State Cardiac Advisory Board.  Spencer is author of over 600 papers on cardiology, has edited or co-edited 12 books including Interventional Cardiology. His research interest has been in the area of restenosis prevention, having been a developer of radiation therapy to block restenosis, as well as new device development, evaluation of therapeutic approaches to cardiovascular disease and preventive cardiology.  Honors include Master of the American College of Cardiology and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the TCT.

Justin E. Davies, MD, PhD

Dr. Justin Davies is a Senior Research Fellow and Honorary Consultant Cardiologist at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London. Justin received his medical degree and PhD from Imperial College. He has trained in interventional cardiology with a specialist interest in physiological and structural assessment of coronary disease states. His main research interests include the development and application of pioneering technologies in engineering to aid understanding of disease mechanisms, and in the diagnosis of pathological disease states. He has used mathematical modelling to aid understand the mechanisms which lead to increased blood pressure which accompany ageing. More recently, Justin has developed coronary wave intensity as a tool to assess the interaction between the coronary microcirculation and the aorta in the supply of blood to the heart.  

Manesh R. Patel, MD

Dr. Manesh Patel is the Chief of the Division of Cardiology and the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at Duke University. He is the Chair of the American College of Cardiology Task Force for Appropriate Use Criteria for Cardiovascular Procedures and is Chair of the American Heart Association Diagnostic and Interventional Cath Committee. He is involved in multiple cardiovascular disease and imaging clinical trials and is leading an effort to redesign the delivery of care to patients undergoing invasive catheterization procedures in the health system. His clinical interests include diagnostic and interventional coronary angiography, peripheral angiography and endovascular intervention. In 2011, Dr. Patel was named the endowed John Bush Simpson Assistant Professor of Cardiology and in 2013, he received the Robert M. Califf Faculty clinical research Award.

Leslee J. Shaw, PhD

Dr Leslee Shaw is a Professor of Medicine at Cornell Medical School and formerly Professor of Medicine at Emory School of Medicine, Director of Women’s Health Research in the Division of Cardiology, and Co-Director of the Emory Clinical Cardiovascular Research Institute. She is immediate past chair of the Cardiovascular Imaging Committee for the American Heart Association (AHA), past President for the Society of Cardiovascular Computed Tomography, past president of the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology and was a member of NHLBI Advisory Council. She is a past awardee of the Women’s Day Magazine Red Dress Award and the American College of Cardiology’s Coalition to Reduce Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Cardiovascular Outcomes award for her diverse contributions to women’s health. She was recently honored by Thomson Reuters as in the top 1% of the nearly 3,200 cited researchers in the world.