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First-rate additions to the UniversalAutomation.org management committee

Agathe Lemaitre from Novo Nordisk and Sam Huang from the Kyland Group are the latest members to join the UniversalAutomation.org board of directors. The two experienced management professionals were elected to the now nine-member board at the 2025 Annual General Meeting.

Brussels, 22 May 2025 – The independent non-profit organization UniversalAutomation.org (UAO) held its Annual General Meeting on 5 May 2025 during this year’s ARC European Leadership Industry Forum. In Sitges near Barcelona – the annual venue for the renowned ARC event – the agenda included the enlargement of board of directors to include two new members. Agathe Lemaitre from the Danish pharmaceutical corporation Novo Nordisk and Sam Huang from the Chinese Kyland Group, both highly regarded management professionals with extensive international networks, are now active members of the UAO management committee. In addition, Sølve Raan from Kongsberg Maritime and David McCall from Intel were re-elected as board members for another term.

Alongside its administrative and oversight functions, the board’s duties also include developing the ideas and strategies necessary for the advancement of the UAO. In addition, the nine-member committee is responsible for implementing the joint decisions made by all the members of the organization at the Annual General Meeting. The Spaniard Raquel Torres has been president of the independent non-profit and chair of the board of directors since May 2024.

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23.05.2025

Leaders with international management expertise

The two board members newly elected in Sitges are first-rate additions to the UniversalAutomation.org management committee. Agathe Lemaitre has been with the well-known Danish pharmaceutical corporation Novo Nordisk since May 2024 and also boasts 10 years’ prior experience in leadership positions in various companies in the oil and gas industry. At Novo Nordisk, one of the global leaders in insulin manufacturing, Lemaitre took charge of the OT Integration area in FPMSAT (Finished Product Manufacturing Science and Technology), which contributes within the company for the technical development of its production sites. A versatile management expert, she has a master’s degree from the prestigious French business school ESSEC and also studied at the Nanyang Business School in Singapore.

Sam Huang was also elected to the board of directors and is a senior executive at the Kyland Group, a global supplier of industrial networking and control products, IIOT communications chips and industrial graded real time operating systems with an headquarter in China. He is currently responsible for corporate development, including mergers and acquisitions, as well as strategic partnerships globally. Huang brings more than 30 years of global leadership experience to the UAO management committee, having had a highly successful management career in various industries and countries, including the United States, France, and Germany. Before moving to the Kyland Group, Huang had leadership roles for the technology corporations Honeywell, Echelon and Cisco, among others. Huang holds an MBA from INSEAD, a world-leading business school, and is currently an executive Coach for INSEAD’s Corporate Leadership Program.

Both Novo Nordisk and the Kyland Group joined the UAO at the beginning of 2025.

A step forward for manufacturer-independent automation

For the UAO president Raquel Torres, the board’s expansion is another important development for the still-young organization:

“We are simply delighted to have attracted two such experienced and first-rate management professionals to our board of directors in the persons of Agathe Lemaitre and Sam Huang. It shows how important the topic of manufacturer-independent automation has now become.”

UniversalAutomation.org provides an independent automation layer for OT components in the form of a guarded source runtime execution engine with no license fees. Unlike, and therefore not in competition with, approaches such as NOA and OPC UA, this makes it possible to fundamentally decouple automation hardware (SPS) and software and provides the basis for essentially manufacturer-neutral and significantly more flexible automation (e.g. according to the IEC 61499 standard). The advantage of this approach for users is that code only needs to be created once and can then be reused across multiple providers and installed on various hardware components in a decentralized manner. It also renders hardware and software lifecycles completely independent of each other, making it easier to manage issues such as integration and migration.

At the start of the year, UniversalAutomation.org had grown to include more than 100 member companies.

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First-rate additions to the UniversalAutomation.org management committee

Agathe Lemaitre from Novo Nordisk and Sam Huang from the Kyland Group are the latest members to join the UniversalAutomation.org board of directors. The two experienced management professionals were elected to the now nine-member board at the 2025 Annual General Meeting.

Leaders with international management expertise

A step forward for manufacturer-independent automation

News & Events

First-rate additions to the UniversalAutomation.org management committee

IEEE ETFA 2025

IEEE ISSIA 2025