Executive Team

Dr Peter Collins, CEO

Peter has held board-level responsibility for technology and operations in engineering companies with market capitalisations of over £200m.

As Operations Director of Sondex plc, a UK-based provider of instrumentation to the oil industry, he restructured production as Group sales quadrupled in two years and led transformation of a cottage industry. Previously, as Technical Director of PII Ltd, the provider of oil pipeline inspection services, he rebuilt the company’s research & development capability in the UK and Germany and played an active part in the sale of the business to GE. Earlier at Arthur D. Little, the management consultants, he led corporate strategy assignments for engineering and technology companies out of the UK office. He began with Sulzer Chemtech AG, a developer of chemical production technology, in Switzerland.

Peter holds a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics from Imperial College London and an MBA from INSEAD.

Trevor Cooper-Chadwick, VP Engineering

Trevor has considerable experience having led development and infrastructure teams as CTO of Orebus, Technical Director of Global Crossing and as a senior manager for Kvaerner. In his most recent role he has been leading the development of large scale grid based computing solutions at the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing. This builds on a history of internet based developments including B2B portals, Tier 1 internet services infrastructures and, for Racal Telecom, a complete ISP hosting and service infrastructure.

Trevor holds an honours degree in mathematics from the University of Southampton.

Prof Simon Cox, Chief Scientist

Simon is a Professor of Computational Methods and director of the Microsoft Institute for High Performance Computing at the University of Southampton, working with Microsoft on its future tools, technologies and platforms in the high performance computing arena. He has collaborations with BAE Systems, Microsoft, Rolls-Royce, and Airbus. He has published over 120 papers and is a regular conference speaker. He has been awarded Microsoft ‘Most Valuable Professional’ status as a Windows Server System Infrastructure Architect annually since 2003. He holds a Ph.D. in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Southampton.

Stephen Giles, VP Sales

Stephen has a long and highly successful track record of selling engineering and simulation software into automotive, aerospace and other markets. He has led sales teams and pioneered new markets in this field.

As UK General Manager of Tecnomatix, now part of UGS, he orchestrated and then delivered a strategy for developing new markets across the engineering and manufacturing sectors. Earlier, he played a part in the explosive growth of 3D design and simulation software whilst with Parametric Technology. At IBM he sold engineering solutions to a wide range of major organisations including automotive OEMs, utility companies, public sector and service businesses. He began with Rolls Royce, conducting research and applying the use of ground-breaking methods of measurement and results visualisation to aero engine development.

Stephen holds and honours degree in Physics from the University of Durham.

Richard Harding, Services Manager

Richard has held senior positions in both engineering consultancy and software development over the last 8 years. 

As Senior Consulting Engineer, based within the University of Southampton's consultancy group, he provided a range of innovative engineering solutions for a broad range of clients including Rolls Royce.  In his previous roles, Richard architected and delivered web based engineering applications exploiting distributed computing technologies for Lloyd's Register and developed naval architectural software used by UK MoD and major defence contractors to support the operation of the UK's naval fleet and for the development of new concept designs. 

Richard holds a bachelors degree in Ship Science from the University of Southampton. 

Peter Williams, Chief Architect

Peter joined dezineforce from Microsoft Corporation where he held a number of technical and managerial roles. Most recently he held the position of Senior Solutions Architect within the UK practice where he led the development of numerous enterprise scale solutions and is one of a handful of people to hold the Microsoft Certified Architect accreditation. He was group manager for software and infrastructure development within Microsoft UK's solution development centre and spent a number of years in Redmond as a senior developer and program manager.

He is a member of the British Computer Society where he represented Microsoft on the CITP accreditation process and holds a first class honours degree in computer science from Leeds University.