Walid Beylouni has been the VP for the Medical Business Unit since March 2023. He joined Danaher in 2013 as General Manager for the Danaher Life Science Platform for the Middle East & Africa Region and has progressed through several roles with incremental responsibilities in the Leica EMEA commercial organization since then.

In his prior role at Leica Microsystems, Walid has been the Vice President Commercial for the EMEA Region since 2018. Under his leadership, the Region delivered above-market sales growth driven by transformational commercial initiatives, process and talent capability building, and leveraging DBS. Before joining Danaher, Walid spent ten years with Stago Group, a global leader in specialized clinical diagnostics, for which he developed the business and established commercial operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Walid earned a master's in Biochemistry from Claude Bernard University in Lyon, France. Walid also graduated from EM Lyon Business School, earning a master's in Strategy and Marketing.

Georges Hakim took over the Vice President Regulatory Affairs and Quality Assurance (RA/QA) position for Leica Microsystems in May 2022. Georges joined Leica in 2018 as Director Regulatory Affairs and Quality Assurance (RA/QA) Medical. Georges brings close to 15 years of international regulatory experience with medical devices. He interacted with various health authorities worldwide to get innovative medical devices on the market. 

He holds a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg.

Dominikus Hamann joined Leica Microsystems as General Counsel on January 1^st, 2020. Dominikus joins us from the Danaher Water Platform, where he served as General Counsel EMEA and global General Counsel for the Hach and OTTHydromet businesses. Dominikus brings an extensive background from the Life Sciences and Technology industries and a top-tier business law firm.

Before Danaher, he worked at Stryker Corporation for 11 years in Legal Counsel roles with international scope and increasing responsibility, partnering closely with business leaders. Dominikus started his career at HEUKING, a leading German business law firm, advising healthcare, tech, and real estate clients.

Knud Mueller has been CFO at Leica Microsystems since February 1^st, 2023. Knud has been a highly regarded Danaher and Leica leader for over a decade, returning to Germany from the US in 2021. He joins us from RKW Group, where he most recently served as Group CFO and board member.

Knud started his professional career at Siemens AG, where he worked for 11 years in progressive finance roles in Germany, Italy, and the US. He joined LMS in 2007 as Group Controller and took his next step as Finance Director at LBS before being promoted to CFO Leica Microsystems in 2012. He continued his successful career journey within Danaher as CFO for Beckman Coulter Diagnostics from 2015-2019, moving to the US. He was then promoted to CFO for the Life Sciences Instruments Group before he decided to return to Germany in 2021 for personal reasons. 

Knud holds an MBA in Business Administration / Finance from the University of Gießen and lives with his wife and three children in Bensheim.

Lon Nelson joined Leica Microsystems as VP Global Service in October 2021. Over his 20 year tenure at Leica Microsystems, he advanced his career from product management through commercial marketing leadership and then sales leadership for our Applied and Nanotechnology businesses. Most recently, Lon led our service organization in the Americas, where he focused on improving service delivery and improving customer experience. Lon brings extensive knowledge of our customers’ needs, our end markets and our solutions to our leadership team.

Lon’s educational background is in biology, with a research focus in plant proteomics, and earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Knox College. His career began at Abbott Laboratories in fertility diagnostics.

James O’Brien became Vice President of Life Science and Applied Solutions in January 2023 as we brought together these businesses. James originally joined Leica Microsystems in March 2019 as VP Applied Microscopy before moving to lead the Life Science Research business unit in June 2020.  

James joined us from Tecan where over 16 years his career progressed from a field-based applications role to leading a variety of Tecan’s end customer businesses. James has worked in academic and biopharma research, diagnostic and applied markets throughout his career.    

James’ educational background is in biology with his career beginning at Johns Hopkins University in genomic research. He holds an MBA from Kenan-Flagler Business School and the OneMBA program. 

Svetomir Stankovic (Tomi) joined Leica Microsystems on April 1, 2020, as Director Operations Wetzlar and was promoted to Vice President Global Operations in January 2023. Tomi brings broad knowledge and experience from the optical industry. Before joining Leica Microsystems, he held multiple positions with Leica Camera AG, most recently as Director Operations. Before joining Leica Camera, he was Director at Toppan Photomasks, managing the Front-End business unit in two locations. As a leadership trainee, Tomi started his career with Advanced Mask Technology Center GmbH & Co. KG. 

He holds a Ph.D. in Physics in the field of Optics from the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, and an MBA from the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. He will continue to be based in Wetzlar. 

Darin Stell joins Leica Microsystems as Senior VP Global Commercial Operations on September 1^st, 2020. Darin joins us from Hach, where he currently serves as their VP Global Sales & DBS. Darin has built his career at Hach over the past 17 years with increasing sales & service responsibilities starting in the UK, then Europe, and since 2017 with responsibility for Sales for North America and Europe with revenues of 800M USD and a team of 1050 associates. Before Hach, he held progressive sales roles at Camlab and Thermo Electron.

Studying Physical Chemistry and with a post-graduate diploma in Marketing, he started his career in the laboratory, progressing to Scientific Officer before moving into the commercial environment more than 25 years ago.

Dirk Voelkel joined Leica Microsystems as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) & Vice President, Global Research & Development in August 2022. Dirk joined Leica Microsystems from Cytiva, where he was Chief Technology Officer leading the Innovation organization. Previously, he developed his career over 15 years at Roche Diagnostics, holding progressive roles in R&D, CTO, and business development, innovating on medical devices for diagnostics applications. In his last position, he served as Head of Research and Technology at Roche Diagnostics Diabetes Care Mannheim. Dirk is passionate about science and inventive, resulting in several patents in his name.

Dirk earned his Ph.D. and diploma in Physics from the University of Göttingen. 

Vibeke Wollebekk, joined Leica Microsystems in July 2021 as Senior Director Digital Marketing and became Vice President Global Marketing in October 2022. Vibeke accelerated our digital marketing transformation, optimized our digital growth engine, and implemented improved systems and tools for marketing. Previously, she worked for seven years at Radiometer, where she successfully led Radiometer through the Transformative Marketing journey. Vibeke is an Advanced Certified Practitioner in Transformative Marketing and holds an ALE degree (Advanced Lead Education). At Radiometer, Vibeke led the Digital Marketing and Market Communication teams. She established strong DBS capabilities during her tenure, enabling marketing to generate and demonstrate incremental revenue, leveraging digital channels.  

Before Vibeke joined Radiometer, she held several progressive roles in the IT industry with regional and global scope in sales and marketing. She has also spent a few years in the advertising world. Vibeke is a strong voice for diversity in the workplace and for building an inclusive culture. Currently, she is also chair of the first Danaher European Associate Resources Group (ARG), Women + Friends.

Vibeke holds a Bachelor's degree in International marketing and leadership from the Norwegian Business School BI.

Aysar Ziyadeh joined Leica Microsystems as Vice President of Danaher Business Systems (DBS) in February 2023. Aysar has been with Danaher since 2014 where he started in the Environmental and Applied segment (now known as Veralto). Since joining Danaher, Aysar has held key strategic roles in which he advanced and leveraged DBS to deploy strategic plans across many business disciplines. This experience includes service commercialization, service digital transformation, product management, go-to-market strategies, supply chain and distribution.

In his most recent role at Hach as Global Integrated Supply Chain leader, he led the supply continuity and distribution strategy deployment which enabled Hach to navigate the supply chain crisis while delivering on company and customer commitments. Before joining Danaher, Aysar held roles with increasing responsibility at Siemens Healthcare, where he worked for 14 years.

Aysar earned his MBA from Northern Illinois University College of Business.