MM | KAX-Consulting

Massimo Marino

Hello, I'm an Italian physicist/computer scientist with over 17 years of experience in scientific research. I left Italy in 1988 to work at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Initially I was supposed to spend only a month to take part on small project of a minor experiment innovating with fiber glass calorimetry, and I ended up staying at CERN for nine years, getting a Fellowship for a three year research project, and worked at the two major experiments Atlas and CMS. At the time I worked primarily on computational physics, was member of RD41 group which was crucial in bringing Object Oriented programming in Physics (moving away from FORTRAN), and I had the 4th ever website in the world, having my office next to Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillaux at bdg 4 near the main cafeteria. I've tested the first browser in the world.

In 1997, my pioneering work in Object Oriented technologies took me to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) in California (USA), for the BaBar experiment at SLAC, and for the US-Atlas collaboration, and my code is most probably still running in the Atlas librairies, especially in the Athena framework for particle and event reconstruction. In the infamous year 2001, LBL sent me to CERN to spend a year as the local representative of US-Atlas at the lab. The single one year became four due to the watershed event of 9/11. Events have a myriad of side effects and mine was that the immigration process to the US took a halt. Fate decided otherwise: in 2004 I was leading the efforts to explore the new Apple Mac OS X Unix-based operating system and worked with other colleagues at porting the CERN computing Library and the experimental reconstruction framework to run on a Mac Book and Apple tower desktops. Results were so positive and eye-opening that Apple started to invite me as customer testimonial to many of their events. The feedback they received was so positive the Apple offered me a challenging position which I could not refuse. In 2005 I started then to work for Apple Europe, and commute regularly with London and all the EMEA region as the Head of Scientific and Research business development unit: I became an Apple Evangelist.

The years at Apple have been fruitful, I met Steve Jobs, and I created and had approved the very first business development strategy ever conceived entirely in Europe, the Apple Research and Technology Support (ARTS) programme, and have it extended to the rest of the world. Usually, all the strategies only come from Cupertino. Period. So, imagine that. I left a mark at Apple. The program supported research projects of leading public academic, research institutions, and labs in the EMEA region.

ARTS has also been used as a use case at INSEAD and somehow my name must have circulated because head hunters started to call. In late 2007 I received a proposition from the World Economic Forum to join the leadership team and lead the WELCOM project. The project wasn't in good shape, it was years late for multiple reasons, and couldn't see the light no matter the efforts at the Forum. WELCOM was presented in Davos in 2008.
WELCOM Partners featured Accenture, Adobe, BT, Infosys, Microsoft, Thomson-Reuters, and TIBCO and I lead the efforts.

Fast forward to 2015 when I joined Advanced Accelerator Application to help the company achieve SOX compliance due to their entry in NASDAQ. I took care of IT Governance as Associate Director. In 2017, I promoted a compliance program for the incoming EU General Data Protection Regulation and I was nominated Group Data Protection Officer in May 2018. AAA has been subsequently bought by Novartis, and I defined, implemented, and realized the whole GDPR compliance program and strategy for the AAA group, trained business in all aspects of the regulation which impacted operations and activities, from production, to clinical trials, marketing, and internal controls. The compliance program developed for AAA is now expanding to Novartis and other companies of the group.

I am a PECB Certified DPO, ISO27001 Lead Implementer, and PECB Certified Trainer.

This chapter closed, I co-founded, with Laura Ravasi, KAX Medical, Pharmaceutical, Information Security and Data Protection Consulting Sarl.

Ah, almost forgot, I am also an award-winning Science Fiction Author. You can find me (obviously) on Amazon.