Directors and Team

BEE(JU), MSc (London), PhD (London), FBCS, FRSA, CMATH, FIMA
Founder and Managing Director

Prof Mitra is an internationally renowned research scientist in the field of Operational Research in general and computational optimization and modelling in particular. He has developed a world class research group in his area of specialisation with researchers from Europe, UK, USA and India. He has published five books and over hundred and fifty research articles. He is an alumni of UCL and currently a Visiting Professor of UCL. In 2004 he was awarded the title of ‘distinguished professor’ by Brunel University in recognition of his contributions in the domain of computational optimization, risk analytics and modelling. In OptiRisk Systems he directs research and actively pursues the development of the company as a leader in the domain of financial analytics. Professor Mitra is also the founder and chairman of the sister company UNICOM seminars. OptiRisk systems and UNICOM Seminars also have subsidiaries in India. In India and Southeast Asia both the companies are going through a period of organic growth.

A full list of his publications and academic activities can be viewed here

Consultant and Associate Researcher

Christina Erlwein-Sayer is a consultant and associate researcher at OptiRisk Systems. Her research interests lie in financial analytics, portfolio optimisation and risk management with sentiment analysis, involving time series modelling and machine learning techniques. She holds a professorship in Financial Mathematics and Statistics at HTW University of Applied Sciences, Berlin. She completed her PhD in Mathematics at Brunel University, London in 2008. She was then a researcher and consultant in the Financial Mathematics Department at Fraunhofer ITWM, Kaiserslautern, Germany. Between 2015 and 2018, prior to joining HTW Berlin in 2019, she was a full-time senior quantitative analyst and researcher at OptiRisk Systems, London, UK. She teaches modules on statistics, machine learning and financial mathematics and is part of the CSAF faculty. Christina is an experienced presenter at conferences and workshops: amongst others, she presented at workshops in London, IIM Calcutta in Kolkata and Mumbai and in Washington to World Bank.

Chief Business Development Officer

Shrey is a Computer Science graduate of Amity University; he has subsequently worked with Hindustan Times in the area of Customer Marketing. He joined UNICOM (Marketing Arm of OptiRisk) in 2015 and managed the Sales and Marketing Back Office in Kolkata/India. Over last 8 years he has gained a rich experience of working in IT, Media, Conferences and Training industries. Recently Shrey has joined OptiRisk Systems as the Chief Business Development Officer to take charge of Sales and Marketing. Shrey is outspoken and ambitious, driven by work and thrives on challenges.

Senior Associate (Consultant)

Dr Porrino has a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from Politecnico di Torino University and a PhD in Industrial Quality Controls from Brunel University. Dr. Porrino published his first scientific paper in an international journal while still an undergraduate and was consequently offered a full scholarship to continue his research as a PhD student, sponsored by the Belgian research centre OCAS. After entering the world of Finance as a Back-Office programmer for Merrill Lynch, Dr. Porrino was quickly promoted to Front-Desk analyst, bridging the gap between Complex FX Options traders and Quantitative Analysts. At a later stage of his career when working for Standard Chartered Bank, Dr. Porrino was in charge of developing their Algorithmic Trading and Auto-Hedging strategies. After leaving the world of Corporate Finance to pursue his own projects, Dr Porrino founded the software company Spirto OÜ which completed a number of NLP research projects in collaboration with Harvard University. In 2021 Dr. Porrino co-founded the Alt-Data provider TMI Data Science, of which he is the CTO. Since May 2021, he has joined the OptiRisk team as an Associate (Consultant).

PhD (Brunel University London), MSc (Politecnico di Milano)
Chief Technology Officer

Dr Valente has a bachelor’s degree, first class honors in Computer Science and subsequently an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from Politecnico di Milano, Italy (2004). He was a sponsored industry based PhD research student in Mathematical Sciences, at Brunel University. He joined OptiRisk Systems in 2005; the company, as the managing partner of the WEBOPT project (CRAFT programme of EU) sponsored his PhD research. Dr Valente’s PhD research was on the topics of Stochastic Programming and parallel computing. Dr Valente leads the design team for AMPL IDE and Stochastic AMPL (SAMPL). These flagship products have been developed under contract from AMPL Optimization Inc. who are also a Partner of OptiRisk Systems. Dr Valente has designed and developed many optimization based decision support systems and substantial industrial risk protection systems and acts as the main technological advisor for external projects. Dr Valente is fluent in Italian (his native language) and English and is also proficient in German.

BSc(Oxon), PhD (Brunel)
Principal Consultant (Retired)

Dr Ellison worked as a Senior Research Associate in CARISMA at Brunel University. He has a long-standing experience of developing large-scale optimization software and has implemented some world-class systems such as APEX and UIMP. He had implemented large part of the FortMP solver system.Dr Ellison had worked closely and extensively with Professor Mitra and had executed a number of projects on behalf of the company. In particular he constructed Portfolio Planning tools for UBS, State Street Global (Allocate), Fidelity Investment and NAG Ltd. He has a first class honours degree BA(Oxon), from the Queen’s College, University of Oxford.

Dr. Brandão has knowledge of Machine Learning and Combinatorial Optimization. He is also an expert in Data Science applied to financial problems, an area where he has won several prizes from different companies and challenges. Dr. Brandão has also been solving many industrial problems since 2009, after creating the Laboratory of Research and Development (LRD) at Universidade Federal de Alfenas (Brazil). Nowadays, this laboratory has been providing services to different companies around the world under his coordination.