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Management Team

 

Bas Van Berkel
President

Educated as a MSc, Civil Engineering, Bas worked in the offshore gas industry as the lead engineer for a number of operations related to pipeline installation and was involved with the first successful operation of what was then the largest natural gas pipe laying vessel in the world.

Bas gained his experience in project development while working for the government, managing projects up to €300 million and running a consultancy specialized in urban and infrastructure developments. His specialization includes contract management and managing contractors in a multi-stakeholder environment, permit acquisiton and quality management on construction sites.

He moved to Canada in 2004 to enroll in the Richard Ivey School of Business MBA program where he served as Vice President of the MBA Association, a $1 Million NGO. After completing his degree Bas sold his Amsterdam-based civil engineering consultancy before co-founding StormFisher Biogas.

Christopher Guillon
Vice President of Finance

Chris has extensive experience in the life science and agriculture sectors. As the founding investor of a veterinary vaccine company, he was involved in shaping the business development strategy leading to licensing of the company’s core technology to a leading U.S.-based life science company. At Warnex Inc., a Canadian developer of diagnostic test kits for the agri-food sector, Chris led the creation of a series of successful collaborative projects between the company and government research agencies that were awarded funding by the federal government.

Chris has experience in the development of corporate strategy through his involvement in the business development unit of Syngenta AG, a Swiss agri-chemical company, where he evaluated new business opportunities. Having obtained a B.Sc. in agriculture and M.Sc. in plant biology at the Macdonald Campus of McGill University, Chris has a solid foundation of knowledge of agricultural and life sciences. His M.Sc. research at McGill resulted in two articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Chris has an MBA with a specialization in Biotechnology from the Richard Ivey School of Business.

Ryan Little
Vice President of Business Development

A consummate entrepreneur, Ryan garnered national press attention with his first business, a sports cards retailer that he launched in 1991 at the age of ten. A few years later, he would launch a firm that would eventually become one of the world's first business-to-business e-commerce applications for the energy industry and may have been Canada's youngest CEO of an incorporated company. During his time as CEO of Avenir Internet Solutions, Ryan spoke regularly to business and academic audiences about the future of e-commerce as a mainstay of business. He handed over the office of CEO to the company's CFO in 1998 to focus on school, at which point the company had achieved profitability and a growing staff of 15.

During his first year at Queen's University in 1999, he cofounded an online charity, CanadaHelps, which in 2007 raised $22.7 million in charitable donations. Ryan is the recipient of the 2000 Young Miracle Maker Award: CIBC World Markets Children's Miracle Day, the 2001 City of Toronto Volunteer of the Year Award and the 2002 Appleby College Young Alumnus of the Year Award.

Ryan graduated with a BA from Queen's University and an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario.