Technical Advisory Board

Dr. Vidya Chandran Darbari is Axiomise’s Chief Strategy and Operations Officer (CSO), co-founder, and company director. She has a unique multi-disciplinary background that spans medicine, mathematics, life sciences and biomedical engineering. As CSO, she is instrumental in steering Axiomise’s strategic direction and operational excellence since its inception, establishing the company as a global leader in formal verification training, consulting & services, and software solutions.

A PhD from University of Cambridge, she holds an Honorary Senior Lecturer position at Queen Mary University of London, where she previously served as Deputy Director of Graduate Studies and Director of the Centre for Molecular Cell Biology. Her research has resulted in high-impact publications in prestigious journals including Nature and Science.

Dr. Darbari has received multiple awards for professional recognition, including the Biochemical Society Early Career Award, the British Crystallographic Association Early Career Prize, a Research Excellence Award from the Science and Engineering Faculty at Queen Mary University of London. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Colin McKellar is an industry veteran with three decades of experience. He brings the customer experience to the Axiomise team having been a key player in driving customer engagements in his previous roles with Apple, Intel, TI, SiFive and SEGA among others. He started his career in electronics 30 years ago in Sony Broadcast and Professional working on HD video encode and decode. Most of his career was spent working at Imagination Technologies as a key contributor to the graphics IP roadmap and was instrumental in bringing in and maturing a world-class verification infrastructure including simulation, formal verification and large FPGA, emulation and silicon farms. McKellar joined X-Silicon in 2023 with the responsibility to drive product and execution for bringing graphics and AI acceleration to the RISC-V ecosystem. He has a wealth of design and verification experience across GPU, CPU, AI and SoC chips successfully managing large multinational teams of more than 200 engineers.

Prof. Lucas C. Cordeiro is a Reader in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester (UoM), UK, where he leads the Systems and Software Security Research Group. Prof. Cordeiro is also the Arm Centre of Excellence Director at UoM. He is affiliated with the Centre for Digital Trust and Society, the Formal Methods Group at UoM, and the Post-Graduate Programs in Electrical Engineering and Informatics at the Federal University of Amazonas, Brazil. His work focuses on formal methods, automated verification, software testing, program synthesis, and security. He has co-authored over 160 peer-reviewed publications in prestigious formal methods and software engineering venues. He has received various international awards, including the Most Influential Paper at ASE’23, the Distinguished Paper at ICSE’11, and 46 awards in Software Verification (SV-COMP) and Testing (Test-Comp) competitions 2012-2024. He has a proven track record of securing research funding from institutions such as the EPSRC, EU Horizon, UKRI, Royal Society, Arm, Intel, Motorola, Nokia, and Samsung.