About Julia Penfield, Ph.D. About
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 onsite 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.
Dr. Penfield has won several awards including: Stevie Award – Gold Medal for AI Innovator of the Year, Stevie Award – Gold Medal for AI Rising Star, and 2026 AI Excellence Award – Overall Winner, Innovative Individual (Business Intelligence Group), 2026 Agentic AI Award – Winner, Innovative Individual (Business Intelligence Group), 2026 TITAN Business Awards – Gold Winner, AI Leader of the Year, and 2021 Best Paper Award – IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid (icSmartGrid).
She is the holder of 16 granted U.S. patents and is internationally recognized as a pioneer in applying AI to worker safety.
Where I'll Be Events
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HSE Learning Summit - North America (H2)
27th October 2026 & 28th October 2026