The Team Behind the Standard

26 years of research across 4 countries. An international team of semantic data experts building the permanence architecture the world needs now.

4
Countries
4
Languages
100+
Years Experience
450M+
Healthcare Markets

Founders

Axius SDC is led by an international team with complementary expertise across the United States, Canada, Brazil, and the United Kingdom - 40+ years combined experience in semantic data modeling and health informatics.

Timothy W. Cook

Timothy W. Cook

Founder & CEO

Academic Credentials

MSc. Health Informatics | BSc. Engineering Technology

Industry Experience

  • 26+ years developing semantic interoperability frameworks
  • Created Multi-Level Health Information Model (MLHIM)
  • Collaborator with W3C, ISO, IHTSDO, and ANSI on semantic data standards
  • Published peer-reviewed work on semantic interoperability and knowledge management

Military Service

US Marine Corps (retired Master Sergeant, 20+ years) - Communications Engineering and Information Warfare

Role at Axius SDC

Full-time CEO, leads product development, architecture, and standards engagement. Primary contact for partnerships and business development.

The Motivation

"After 20 years in military comms, I learned that if the message isn't clear, the mission fails. I built SDC so the message never degrades."

LinkedIn Profile Full CV Personal Website
Dr. Luciana Tricai Cavalini

Dr. Luciana Tricai Cavalini, PhD

Co-Founder & Chief Medical Officer

Academic & Clinical Roles

  • Associate Professor, Fluminense Federal University - UFF (Niteroi, Brazil)
  • Family Health Physician, SUS (Ilhota, SC, Brazil)
  • Clinician at Child and Teenager's CAPS, SUS (Itajai, SC, Brazil)

Educational Background

Medical degree (1994) | Master's in Public Health (1999) | PhD in Collective Health (2005) | Post-doctorate from Karolinska Institutet, Sweden (2008)

17-Year Collaboration with Tim

  • First met at OSHCA conference, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2008)
  • KEY contributor to Multi-Level Health Information Model (MLHIM) development
  • KEY contributor to generalization of MLHIM to S3Model framework
  • Co-authored multiple publications on MLHIM and S3Model

Strategic Value for SDC

Brazilian SUS Domain Expert with Active Clinical Practice: Direct, real-world knowledge of Sistema Unico de Saude (Brazil's public health system serving 200M+ citizens). Validates language-agnostic approach for Portuguese-speaking markets and Latin American expansion (650M+ population).

The Motivation

"Healthcare data should do more than document care - it should continuously generate knowledge. My work has been driven by the idea that properly structured clinical information can power real-time insights for both medicine and public health. At Axius, we are building SDC to make that possible at scale."

LinkedIn Profile CV (Portugues) CV (English)
Dr. Nikki Shaw

Dr. Nikki Shaw, BSc(Hons), PhD, FBCS

Co-Founder & Chief Research Officer

Health informatics specialist and the first research chair in health informatics in Western Canada. Originally from England, Nikki is deaf and uses a service dog. She is very open to collaboration and partnerships.

Academic & Leadership Roles

  • Full professor of biology (health sciences), Algoma University
  • Speaker of the Senate, Algoma University
  • Senate representative, Governor, Board of Governors, Algoma University
  • NOSM University tutor
  • Member, International Joint Commission's Health Professionals Advisory Board

Research Expertise

Health services research | Disability studies | Medical ethics | Health informatics

25-Year Collaboration with Tim

  • First met at AMIA Conference 2000 (invited workshop on open source in healthcare)
  • Co-authored peer-reviewed publication: "Open source and international health informatics: Placebo or panacea?"
  • International advisor for FreePM (Tim's open source healthcare project)
  • Co-founded PATH Group (health informatics research collaborative in Canada)

Strategic Value for SDC

Canadian Healthcare Systems Expert: 20 years experience across BC, Alberta, Ontario. Brings critical insight for language-agnostic data models in bilingual (English/French) environments and accessibility considerations.

The Motivation

"Research data is useless if it dies in a spreadsheet. I built SDC to ensure scientific knowledge outlives the grant cycle."

LinkedIn Profile Full CV About Dr. Shaw

Strategic Advisors

Not three separate resumes, but one continuous line of governance around the substrate. Dr. Christopher Marcum authored the federal open-data mandates SDC operationalizes. Thomas Beale created the semantic-modeling standards now recognized as ISO. Timothy Lee governs security and compliance for U.S. Government, defense, and regulated industry. Policy requires it. Standards express it. Security certifies it.

Christopher Steven Marcum, Ph.D.

Christopher Steven Marcum, Ph.D.

Strategic Advisor -- Policy, Federal Partnerships & Standards Adoption

Federal Policy Leadership

  • Former Assistant Director, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
  • Former Senior Statistician and Senior Scientist, White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
  • Spearheaded the August 2022 OSTP Public Access Memo
  • Principal author of OMB M-25-05: OPEN Government Data Act implementation guidance

Open Science & Data Policy

World leader in the open science movement and advocate for global adoption of FAIR data principles. Senior Fellow in the Center for Data Policy at the Data Foundation.

Strategic Value for SDC

Axius SDC is operationalizing the open data mandates that Dr. Marcum authored as federal policy. His endorsement of the SDC specification validates the architecture against the FAIR principles he helped institutionalize at the federal level.

On the SDC Specification

"This is probably the most clear documentation of a reference data model that I've ever seen."

LinkedIn Profile Personal Website
Thomas Beale

Thomas Beale

Strategic Advisor | Pioneer of Two-Level Modeling & Chief Architect of openEHR

Creator of Global Data Standards

Creator and Chief Architect of the openEHR Archetype Definition Language (ADL) and Archetype Object Model (AOM), which are now recognized as formal ISO standards for clinical knowledge modeling.

E-Health Architecture Pioneer

Lead of the openEHR.org Specification Program and primary author of its core reference models, governance frameworks, and executable workflow specifications.

Enterprise & Government Strategist

Trusted technical advisor and consultant for massive healthcare ecosystems worldwide, including the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Intermountain Healthcare, and numerous national Ministries of Health.

Cross-Industry Systems Expert

Brings over three decades of rigorous software engineering expertise, ranging from CMM level 4 real-time control systems and enterprise finance to shaping international e-health interoperability (HL7, CEN, IHTSDO, OMG).

LinkedIn Profile Blog
Timothy Allen Lee

Timothy Allen Lee

Strategic Advisor -- U.S. Government & Defense, Security & GRC

Security, Risk & Compliance Leadership

20 years building defense-grade GRC programs, Information Security Management Systems, and Quality Management Systems. Designs and advises on multi-framework security and compliance controls across NIST 800-53, CMMC, NIST AI RMF, ISO 27001 and 42001, HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2, and the EU AI Act, for regulated enterprises, healthcare, software and AI companies, hyperscalers, and cloud service providers.

Credentials

M.A. Executive Leadership, Liberty University | B.S., Murray State University. CISA, CISM, ISO 42001 / 27001 / 9001 Lead Auditor, DAWIA PM III (Advanced), Prosci Change Management Practitioner, and AWS Digital Sovereignty Technical Partner.

AI Governance & Framework

Author of The Symphony of Defense: A Global Blueprint for Securing the Agentic Frontier - a three-movement, six-pillar, 42-step framework for governing AI agents that act, transact, and self-direct in production.

Military Service

U.S. Army / Kentucky Army National Guard (Captain, 10 years) - Logistics, Maintenance, and Information Warfare.

Strategic Value for SDC

Brings U.S. Government and defense go-to-market depth and enterprise GRC rigor, with a career spanning the Defense Contract Management Agency, Defense Logistics Agency, Raytheon, BAE Systems, Deloitte, Coalfire, and AI-frontier firms including Anthropic and Harvey AI. His Symphony of Defense framework positions SDC as the open-standards and provenance floor that agentic-AI governance requires, aligning it with NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, and federal assurance frameworks.

On SDC

"The Semantic Data Charter solves the substrate problem my audit chain governance layer sits on top of. That is architecture alignment."

LinkedIn Profile

Why This Team Matters

International Perspective = Global Market Opportunity

Our team spans US (enterprise), Canada (bilingual systems), and Brazil (Latin America). This validates SDC's language agnosticism - our primary differentiator for unlocking 75% of the world's non-English markets.

Proven Collaboration History

Not a "team on paper" - decades of professional collaboration: 26-year partnership (Tim + Tom, since 2000), 26-year partnership (Tim + Nikki), 17-year partnership (Tim + Luciana), joint publications, and real-world healthcare implementations.

Advisory Depth = Federal & Enterprise Credibility

Our advisors cover the full governance stack: federal open-data policy (Marcum), ISO modeling standards (Beale), and defense-grade security and compliance (Lee). SDC is validated against the mandates, the standards, and the controls at once.

40+ years combined experience across the United States, Canada, Brazil, and the United Kingdom in semantic data modeling, health informatics, and international standards development.