Julia Penfield, Ph.D.
Vice President of Research and Machine Learning
VelocityEHS
Dr. Julia Penfield is the Senior Vice President and Chief AI Officer at VelocityEHS, where she leads all Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (ML/AI) initiatives across the company.
She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, before transitioning from academia to industry. In 2015-2017, Dr. Penfield spent more than two years working on-site at BC Hydro power plants in Canada. That hands-on experience—wearing steel-toe boots on the ground—shaped her perspective on worker safety, high hazardous environments, and Serious Injuries and Fatalities (SIFs), and continues to fuel her passion for advancing cutting-edge EHS solutions.
Over the course of her career, she has led numerous AI initiatives in forecasting, risk identification and assessment, predictive modeling, uncertainty modeling, and stochastic, heuristic, and portfolio optimizations.
She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada, before transitioning from academia to industry. In 2015-2017, Dr. Penfield spent more than two years working on-site at BC Hydro power plants in Canada. That hands-on experience—wearing steel-toe boots on the ground—shaped her perspective on worker safety, high hazardous environments, and Serious Injuries and Fatalities (SIFs), and continues to fuel her passion for advancing cutting-edge EHS solutions.
Over the course of her career, she has led numerous AI initiatives in forecasting, risk identification and assessment, predictive modeling, uncertainty modeling, and stochastic, heuristic, and portfolio optimizations.