Director of Corporate Development, Neo Performance Materials

Biography

Vasileios serves as Director of Corporate Development at Neo Performance Materials, the leading global company producing rare-earth and rare metal advanced oxide and magnetic materials that are critical to fast-forward our world's transition to green technologies. At Neo, he leads new business development initiatives and global government relations, while also overseeing the Greenland mining project and co-authoring Neo's annual Sustainability Report. Concurrently, he serves as elected Board Director and Executive Committee member of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in Canada, and as elected Board Director of the Global Rare Earth Industry Association (REIA) where he also serves as Chair of its Public Policy Committee. Previously, he worked at Canada's premier management consulting and government relations firm StrategyCorp Inc, where he led engagements for clients pursuing market entry and investment in public-policy-sensitive industries. He started his business career in investment banking at a Canadian boutique firm and in corporate development for the Canadian technology company Keela.co, of which he remains a shareholder. Additionally, he has served as Venture Partner to the Washington DC venture capital firm NextGen VC, as Chair of the Canada Observatory (Transatlantic Relations Initiative) of the IE School of Global & International Affairs, and as Global Panel Member of the MIT Technology Review. In his political activism past, he was a campaign advisor to several political candidates pursuing election or appointment in Canada, the European Union, and the United Nations. In 2019-2020, he served as Policy Chair and drafted the campaign platform for a leadership candidate of a major provincial party in Canada. In 2015, he served as Head of Delegation for a EU interest group at the COP21 UN Climate Summit. He has published articles on LSE 's EuroCrisis and the Huffington Post. In the past decade, he was recognized as one of the 100 Future Global Leaders by the Web Summit and a Greek America's 40 Under 40, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Global Shaper of the World Economic Forum. He obtained his Bachelors in Chemical Engineering at the University of Toronto (Canada) and his Masters in Finance at IE Business School (Spain).