Board of Directors
Dr. Khaled El Emam
Senior Scientist, CHEO Research Institute.
Dr. Khaled El Emam has founded or co-founded five companies involved with data management and data analytics in the health research domain. In January of 2022, Khaled’s most recent company, Replica Analytics, was purchased by Aetion, the global leader in real-world evidence (RWE) technology and analytics. He is the Canada Research Chair in Medical AI and a senior scientist at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) Research Institute.
Jason Flick
CEO, Serial Entrepreneur, Investor, and Advisor
Jason Flick is a CEO, serial entrepreneur, investor, and advisor with successful exits such as YOU.i TV (sold to HBO/AT&T), and N-able (sold to SolarWinds). His most recent company, You.i TV doubled in size each year and had some of the biggest media and technology companies in the world as customers. Jason brings 25 years of technical and business leadership to the DistillerSR board. He also serves on a number private sector company boards and entrepreneur focused entities.
Maria Pacella
Managing Partner, Pender Ventures
Maria Pacella is a Managing Partner at Pender Ventures. Maria invests in exceptional entrepreneurs that excel at identifying business opportunities, develop world-class products and are dedicated to building great companies. Prior to Pender, she spent 11 years with one of Canada’s largest venture capital firms where she invested in multiple early-stage ventures. She holds a BBA from Simon Fraser University, is a CFA charterholder and a past President of CFA Society Vancouver.
Andrew Pinkerton
Partner at Thomvest Ventures
Andrea is a Partner at Thomvest Asset Management in Toronto and is focused on private technology investments in Canada. Prior to his investing career, Andrew worked at software vendor Workbrain Corporation and in the technology investment banking groups of Credit Suisse First Boston and Alex. Brown & Sons Technology Group in San Francisco and Boston, respectively. He has a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College and an MBA from the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto.
Peter O'Blenis
Chief Executive Officer
Peter is a pioneer in literature review automation. Having co-founded DistillerSR in 2009, he went on to demonstrate the first practical use of AI for reference screening at the Cochrane Colloquium in 2011.
Prior to DistillerSR, Peter co-founded TrialStat, maker of the first commercially available systematic literature review platform. He holds an MBA from Queen’s and a BSc in Computer Science from Carleton.