Our people

Andreas Sohmen-Pao is Chairman of BW Group. He is also Chairman of the Singapore Maritime Foundation and a trustee of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. Mr Sohmen-Pao was previously Chief Executive Officer of BW Group. He graduated from Oxford University with an honours degree in Oriental Studies and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Capt. Katsuya Abe San is President of Nissen Kaiun, the largest private shipowners in Japan with more than 200 vessels. He began his career with Mitsui O.S.K Lines, Ltd and later acquired a license of Captain. His maritime career spans over four decades. He is a graduate of the Yuge National College of Maritime Technology, Japan.

Mikael Skov is Chief Executive Officer of Hafnia. Mr Skov was the co-founder and CEO of Hafnia Tankers and has more than 33 years of experience in the shipping industry. Mr Skov is a board member of Clipper Group Ltd. and was an industry representative of the Danish Maritime Strategy Team established by the Ministry of Industry, Business and Financial Affairs.

Capt. Unni is the Co-CEO and a board member of the Alpha Ori Group. In a career spanning over 25 years in shipping, he has served in various roles across countries. He is driven by a vision to transform the maritime industry through technology and innovation. He is a Class 1 Master Mariner from the LBS College of Advanced Maritime Studies & Research, Mumbai.

Bala Sankaran is a business, operations, and tech executive. Previously, he was Vice President – Global Sales, Marketing Operations & Learning at Twitter. Bala also spent 6 years in management roles at Google, NYC. His strategic expertise was acquired at McKinsey & Company and he holds a Marine Engineering degree from MERI, Calcutta and a Master of Business Administration from Wharton School.

Padhu is a tenured Professor of Mathematical Sciences at George Mason University and serves as the Director of the STEM Accelerator Program in the College of Science as well as the Director of COMPLETE at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He holds Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics University of Maryland, MSc of Science (Honors) in Mathematics and Bachelor of Engineering (Honors) in Electrical & Electronics Eng, BITS, Pilani.

Sam is a business and technology executive in the B2B enterprise and mobile software industry specializing in devices, platform, applications and services. He has managed P&L of various cutting edge technology businesses including Cloud and Edge SW, AGPS, IoT, OS platform, Computational camera, Computer Vision and Machine Learning.

Prior to joining AOT as Cofounder and Chief Product Officer, Sam led Qualcommʼs business unit for Advanced Software Technologies on Snapdragon chipsets. His career also includes various product management and business development roles at Sprint Inc. and Nextel Communications Inc. in mobile handset and machine to machine (M2M) divisions. Sam started his career as an engineer in mercantile marine and served to become Assistant Chief Engineer on oil tankers. Sam has completed the executive business administration program (PLD) from Harvard Business School. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from DMET in India and, an MBA from The College of William and Mary (Raymond A Mason School of Business) in the USA.

Biju is a technology professional with more than 25 years of experience. He has been spearheading advanced product engineering development for ThinkPalm Technologies and his interests span across development, quality assurance and engineering operation functions.

His extensive international experience has enabled him to manage globally distributed organizations as part of the senior management teams at Fortune companies, including major telecom product companies like Cisco & Brocade. He has also led business units as VP/General Manager of businesses at Ruckus Wireless taking new products to market with P&L ownership. He is based out of California and spearheading the Alpha Ori Group activities across the technology and products spectrum.