Our Team

Teamwork, commitment, and innovation are the cornerstones of the Ferrum team. We believe our best work is born from personal responsibility,
visionary goals and shared fun.

Our Leadership Team

We’re a team of passionate healthcare entrepreneurs driven by the common
goal of using technology to make healthcare better – for both
patients and those providing care.

Pelu Tran

Pelu Tran

CEO and Co-Founder

Kenneth Ko

Kenneth Ko

CTO and Co-Founder

Peter Eason

Peter Eason

Chief Financial Officer

Margarita Rossiytseva

Head of AI Partnerships

Samantha Swerdfeger

Head of Product

Keith E. Chew

Keith E. Chew, MHA, CMPE, FRBMA

Market Development

Elie Balesh

Elie Balesh, MD

Medical Director

Joseph Chui

Joseph Chui, M.Sc.

Head of Machine Learning

Leon Bergen

Leon Bergen

Natural Language Processing Lead

Tristan Cheever

Tristan Cheever

Director of Enterprise Applications

Kathleen Poulos

Kathleen Poulos

Marketing

Nina Ho

Nina Ho

Clinical Accounts Lead

Pelu Tran
Pelu Tran
CEO and Co-Founder

Cofounder and CEO of Ferrum Health, Pelu is a serial healthcare entrepreneur living in San Francisco. Pelu studied both medicine and engineering at Stanford University and was four months away from receiving his MD when he dropped out to start his first company. 

As founder of Augmedix, now a publicly traded company, Pelu led the product and commercial teams, growing the company to over 1,000 employees in five countries and $20M in annual revenue from over half of the largest health systems in the US. After watching his uncle pass away from a preventable medical error, Pelu founded Ferrum Health, an enterprise AI deployment platform with the mission of improving patient outcomes by democratizing health systems’ access to the most innovative and impactful clinical AI technologies from around the world.

Pelu is Technology Pioneer and Expert Contributor for the World Economic Forum, a Fellow of the UN World Summit on Innovation, a member of Forbes’ Healthcare 30 under 30, and an Aspen Institute Scholar. He has spoken on Voice of America, Stanford Medicine 25, Rock Health Summit, Forbes 30 under 30 Summit, Health 2.0, State of Reform, and Citi Digital Health Forum. He guest lectures at UC Berkeley, UCSF, and Stanford on healthcare leadership and innovation. 

In his travels working with health systems around the world, you can find him learning about local cultures by trying the street food, listening to local musicians, and skiing, hiking, and diving any wilderness he can find.

Kenneth Ko
Kenneth Ko
CTO and Co-Founder

Kenneth Ko is Ferrum’s Chief Technology Officer and cofounder, with over 10 years of experience delivering mission critical, zero downtime solutions for enterprise healthcare, content delivery, and data center systems. As a technologist, Ken has deep experience identifying, developing, and providing solutions that address the modern technical and business needs for reliability, scalability, and performance.

Ken has led enterprise-wide, background deployments of AI applications in healthcare with demonstrable clinical value, without the need for widespread physician workflow modification. He is an active participant in the local and open-source technology communities.

Ken spends his time outside work documenting climbing and backcountry adventures in the mountains.

Peter Eason
Peter Eason
Vice President Finance & Operations

Peter Eason is Ferrum’s Vice President of Finance and Operations. He is responsible for working with customers, developers and strategic partners to unlock the full value of the Ferrum Platform for all parties. Peter is a strategic thinker who stops at nothing short of delivering a best-in-class product for our customers around the globe.

Prior to Ferrum, Peter led a 500+ person operations team at a digital health startup where he significantly altered the go-to-market strategy on the way to doubling the size of the now publicly held business. He began his career in Investment Banking at J.P. Morgan, providing M&A advice for mid-cap clients across a diverse range of industries.

Peter and his wife, both Georgetown University graduates, and their lab Huxley are always on the lookout for the next great United States road trip.

Margarita Rossiytseva
Head of AI Partnerships

Margarita Rossiytseva is Ferrum’s Head of AI Partnerships. She is responsible for working with strategic partners and innovative software companies to bring AI solutions to the customers. Margarita is an agile program manager who focuses on building effective relationships to facilitate change and bring exposure to partner products in the healthcare space. Outside of Ferrum, Margarita is a licensed mental health counselor, providing clinical risk assessment collateral to hospitals regarding individuals in crisis. Previously, Margarita spent over four years at Amazon in a variety of roles focusing on HR, Vendor management, and Program Management. Margarita’s experience combines both business and clinical roles across a variety of settings ranging from start-up, government, healthcare, corporate, and retail. Outside of work, Margarita’s passion is traveling. She’s spent the last 6 out of the 12 months abroad, exploring Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico. She finally admits that Taco Bell tacos, while delicious, are not real tacos. Her Spanish skills have also improved, and she can now proudly ask for more cheese on said tacos anywhere she goes.

Keith E. Chew
Keith E. Chew, MHA, CMPE, FRBMA
Market Development

For more than 40 years, Keith has served as a healthcare thought leader and subject matter expert with direct experience as a Consultant, Hospital VP of Physician Network and Ancillary Services, Director of Practice Management, Practice Administrator and Chief Executive Officer for large and small medical practices. Over the past 22 years, Keith has developed a specialty practice focusing on hospital-based practices, especially medical imaging, and radiology. 

He has demonstrated expertise assisting physicians, hospitals and health systems with practice leadership solutions, management, operations improvement, governance, strategic planning, and strategic positioning. Keith holds multiple degrees and is a past president of the RBMA. During his career, he and has been a guest speaker for the RBMA, HFMA, ACR, MGMA, Becker’s Hospital Review, The Leader’s Board, multiple state radiology societies, RBMA Chapters and other professional organizations across the country.

Keith and his wife have an adult daughter and two Scotties to keep them busy. He enjoys cooking, volunteering, fishing, singing and is known to have a palate for good scotch, bourbon, and rye. 

Elie Balesh
Elie Balesh, MD
Medical Director

Dr. Balesh is the medical director at Ferrum Health. He is a double board-certified, dual fellowship-trained diagnostic and interventional radiologist with postdoctoral expertise in digital health and medical device innovation. In his role at Ferrum Health, he leads the development of artificial intelligence use cases, clinical implementation, and research operations. 

He holds degrees from Harvard University, Yale University and completed postgraduate training at Massachusetts General Hospital, Texas Medical Center, and UT Southwestern Medical Center. He is a member of the American College of Radiology, Society of Interventional Radiology, and the Texas Council on Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke.

Joseph Chui
Joseph Chui, M.Sc.
Head of Machine Learning

Joseph is leading the development of machine learning (ML) applications at Ferrum. He brings over 20 years of professional experience in developing software solutions to help organizations in various regulated industries.

Joseph began his passion for applying ML in healthcare when he was a graduate student at the Montreal Neurological Institute. During his time with the institute, he developed a statistical framework to compare populations based on the predictions made by ML algorithms on medical images.

Prior to joining Ferrum, Joseph spent most of his career at FANUC America, where he developed various intelligent solutions to improve the safety and efficiency of robotic processes. His software solutions have revolutionized the workflows of robotic engineers by automating and simplifying the process designs.   

He reinvigorated his passion for using ML in healthcare after competing in various competitions. His first ML competition focused on seizure detection, he wanted to help build an ML model that one day would benefit his child, who was suffered from Epilepsy. 

Joseph is a firm believer that the golden age of AI has arrived and that it’s time to recognize the benefits in patient care. 

Leon Bergen
Leon Bergen
Natural Language Processing Lead

Leon Bergen leads the natural language processing and ModelOps initiates at Ferrum Health. After joining the team in 2017, he developed the first versions of Ferrum’s natural language processing system. More recently, he has been working to automate performance evaluation of Ferrum’s machine learning systems.

Leon is currently a faculty member at University of California San Diego, where his research focuses on computational linguistics. He has published extensively in the natural language processing, cognitive science, and linguistics space.  He received a Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Leon’s role at Ferrum Health offers him a unique opportunity to use machine learning to make a true impact on patient care. Outside of work, he enjoys food and travel.

Tristan Cheever
Tristan Cheever
Director of Enterprise Applications

Tristan Cheever is Ferrum’s Director of Enterprise Applications. In his original role as Lead Platform Engineer, he managed the client site implementation of the Ferrum Platform. His experience working directly with health systems, coupled with his strong enterprise solution skills, enables Tristan and his team to closely partner with clients to achieve their technology goals. 

In prior roles Tristan has designed and delivered enterprise solutions in network management and analytics, scalable, high-speed network storage, end-to-end visibility, software-defined networking, and big data. Tristan brings hands-on experience in hardware design, embedded systems, kernel device drivers, low-level systems programming, and web applications.

Outside of work, Tristan enjoys spending time with his family, discovering the Pacific Northwest, and playing basketball.

Kathleen Poulos
Kathleen Poulos
Head of Marketing

Kathleen leads the marketing initiatives at Ferrum Health. She is a registered nurse with a digital marketing background and a passion for improving the healthcare experience. She enjoys using her clinical and creative skills, along with her love of technology, to find innovative ways to solve today’s healthcare challenges. 

Her unique combination of experience in healthcare, technology, and digital marketing makes today’s healthcare ecosystem an ideal setting for utilizing her business and clinical skills.  As a melanoma survivor, Kathleen is personally motivated to help improve the lives of other patients. She feels strongly that artificial intelligence can truly benefit patient care and save lives. It was this vision that motivated her to join Ferrum Health.

Prior to joining the Ferrum team, she was the co-founder of a technology company connecting life sciences organizations with real-time feedback from healthcare professionals. Kathleen’s experience includes clinical and business roles in the medical device, pharmaceutical, and healthcare technology space. 

Nina Ho
Nina Ho
Clinical Accounts Lead

Nina Ho is the Clinical Accounts Lead at Ferrum Health. She has over 7 years of experience launching new healthcare products and solutions in collaboration with healthcare leaders such as Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles (CHLA) and Cortica.

She is responsible for leading Ferrum’s Clinical Accounts initiatives, engaging directly with clinicians and health system leadership to bring new technologies to the market. She is the crucial link between Ferrum end users and the Ferrum team.

Nina is passionate about bringing digital and technological innovation into the healthcare industry and playing a role in saving lives, which is what brought her to Ferrum Health. Before joining the team, Nina worked in accounts, product, and operations at Sidebench, a technology consulting firm.

Nina was born and raised in San Francisco, California. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles and currently resides in Los Angeles but stays loyal to her Giants, Niners, Warriors, and Sharks. She enjoys exploring new foods (especially desserts) and jamming to 90s R&B and Hip Hop.

Ben Nguyen
Ben Nguyen
Head of Product

Dr. Benjamin (Ben) Nguyen is head of product at Ferrum Health. He is responsible for leading product vision and strategy at Ferrum, making it easier for hospitals to find, deploy, and manage AI solutions that improve healthcare delivery.

Before joining Ferrum, Ben led product at GIBLIB, enabling physicians to access world class medical education online, and Business Development at Sidebench Health to build innovative digital products for health insurance companies and hospitals.

Ben started his journey in healthcare tech at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, where he was enrolled in the M.D. program. It was during his training that Ben realized the potential of technology in transforming patient care, leading him to join Ferrum Health after graduating with his M.D.

David Miller
VP of Sales, West

David brings more than 25 years of experience in healthcare sales and sales leadership leading complex sales for high-growth healthcare technology companies.

David brings the proven ability to match customer needs with solution value, align sales and service delivery to optimize the onboarding of new customers, and support high customer retention rates by positioning customers for ongoing success. He brings a consistent record of improving sales performance and growing revenue in small entrepreneurial, mid-market public, and private corporations.

Previously David has worked at IDX Systems, GE Healthcare, CodeRyte, 3M, and Health Catalyst with broad experience in clinical, revenue cycle, and analytics solutions for the acute, inpatient, and ambulatory care segments.

David is an avid sailor and lives in the San Francisco bay area with his wife Bridget.

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