About us
The 26262 club is a community-driven online media platform and discussion forum that is formed by international ISO 26262 working group members and international functional safety practitioners. Our goal is to share non-competitive best practices to ensure the safety of electronic systems and encourage collaboration among the automotive value chain. The 26262 club also gives back to the industry by sponsoring students and encouraging them to pursue careers in this field. We welcome discussons with practitioners of all knowledge levels and we hope to share some best practices with you.
The 26262 club organising committee started putting together annual digital meetings back in in December 2019. These digital meetings are based on current topics of interest, related industry updates, as well as feedback from the community. Together as a group, the 26262 organising committee includes members that have been working on ISO 26262 since the very beginning and represent their countries to international ISO working groups. We also represent decades of academic experience in automotive engineering and safety. We have been collaborating one way or another for many years now.
Organizing Committee Members

Dave Higham is the Vice President of Functional Safety of Codasip, the leading supplier of customizable processor IP. Prior to that he worked as the Senior Principal Functional Safety Engineer at Imagination Technologies where he is responsible for safety process and project execution for graphics software. He has 30 years’ experience in the development of real-time embedded systems for the automotive industry throughout the supply chain. He is an IET chartered engineer and is actively involved in UK industry safety-related working groups including the development of the automotive functional safety standard ISO 26262.

Kai Höfig studied Computer Science at RWTH Aachen, Germany and holds a PhD from the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) where he combined safety-related models and timing analysis models in a probabilistic approach for conditional execution time. As a senior key expert, he currently leads the Model-based Reliability and Safety Engineering Lab at the Research and Technology Center Systems Engineering at Siemens Corporate Technology. There he continues to work with safety-critical systems and supports certification activities in various domains, such as automotive, healthcare, railway, energy and industry automation. His research activities include model-based approaches for reliability, availability, maintainability and safety. The long term vision of his research is to provide top-notch technologies to establish sophisticated efficient reliability and safety engineering models and processes integrated in all development phases of a product. Since February 2018 he is continuing his activities as a professor for safety and security at the University of Rosenheim.

Stefan Leue obtained a Diploma Degree in Computer Science and Economics from the University of Hamburg (D) in 1990, and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Berne (CH) in 1995. From 1995 throughout 2000 he was first an Assistant Professor and later a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo (CDN). In 1998 he was a Member of Technical Staff in the Computing and Mathematics Research Center of Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill (USA). In 2000 he accepted a Professorship in Computer Networks and Telematics at the University of Freiburg (D). In 2004 he was appointed Full Professor and holder of the Chair for Software and Systems Engineering at the University of Konstanz (D). Visiting appointments include the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble (F), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (CH) and New York University (USA). His research interests are in developing methods for Complex Systems Engineering, with special focus functional safety, automotive software engineering, formal verification, legal tech, machine learning and explainable artificial intelligence.

Tomislav Lovric joined NVIDIA Automotive in May 2021 as Principal Process Architect (IPP). He has worked in safety since 1991 in various industries, ranging from: commissioning a microwave landing system for London Heathrow Airport, assessing the safety of the driverless metro in Copenhagen, as well as consulting for steer-by-wire for agricultural machinery. He has worked in the build-up of the Automotive Functional Safety Services of TÜV NORD Mobility and supported various standardization organizations. He worked for 11 years with ZF Central Safety Team in various Safety Roles, including: Safety Assessor Braking, Senior Technical Specialist, Safety Auditor for Europe and Asia Pacific, Chief Engineer ZF Corporate System Safety – responsible for ZF Safety Processes, ZF Safety Assessments, ZF Safety Trainings and other ZF Central Safety Services. Dr. Lovric holds a Doctorate in Computer Science on Dependable Computer Systems from the University of Essen (Germany).

Pantelitsa Markus has been part of the SEMI team since 2019 and currently manages the activities of SEMI Europe’s program committees and strategic initiatives. Prior to that, she was managing an automotive media division and a broad portfolio of automotive media and conference services in US and Europe. Pantelitsa holds a post graduate degree from Loughborough University Design School and an undergraduate degree from Lancaster University. She is also actively involved with the European automotive functional safety community and Berlin’s UI/UX research community.

Pierre Metz, as the global lead in functional safety at the Brose Group, leads the worldwide establishment of all the necessary processes, methods, training, and safety personnel for the development of safety-related mechatronic 1st tier systems. He also actively coaches projects himself.
Dr. Metz is a member of the international ISO 26262 working group (co-author of ISO 26262 2nd Edition). He is part of the German national steering committee on ISO 26262, and leader of the German mirror group on ISO 26262 Part 9. Furthermore, he is co-author of Automotive SPICE, an automotive SPICE Principal Assessor, and he trains Automotive SPICE Assessors. He is a member of the intacs (international assessor certification schema) Advisory Board as well as a technical book author. Dr. Metz has been on the program committee and advisory board, as well as a speaker at various international conferences.

Gareth Price has over 25 years experience of developing embedded systems to the latest product and process standards within new startups and multinational organisations. For the past 15 years Gareth has focused on developing high assurance products and the associated processes within the automotive and avionics domain. Gareth has a Degree in Engineering and a Diploma in Management and is a member of the UK ISO committee. Gareth is currently Director of Software Delivery at Eatron Technologies covering Quality Management, Functional Safety and Product Delivery for ADAS/AD, Motion Control and Battery Management applications incorporating Cloud based AI.

Roger Rivett worked in the automotive industry for 37 years on real-time embedded-systems fulfilling a number of different roles including software developer, Project Leader and Software Quality Manager. He retired from his role as Functional Safety Technical Specialist in Jaguar Land Rover in January 2019.He is a visiting fellow on the University of York Assuring Autonomy International Programme and a member of the MISRA Automotive Safety Argument working group. He also the chair of the SCSC steering group and a member of its working groups for the Safety of Autonomous Systems and the creation of a Risk Ontology.
Mr. Rivett is a Chartered Engineer, and a fellow of the IET. He has an MSc in Software Engineering from Oxford University and an Engineering Doctorate from York University.

Riccardo Vincelli works as Director of the Functional Safety Competence Center of Renesas where he worked for the past 22 years leading now an international team of experts. He has over 15 years experience working with the development of HW/SW components for usage in functional safety applications. In particular he is now leading technical assessments for various products (MCUs, SoCs, MSIG as well as SW) as well as strongly contributing to internal processes/methodology for safety.
Riccardo strongly contributed to the creation of several standards as ISO26262 (1st edition and part 11 in the second edition), as well as the ISO PAS 19451, now withdrawn, and he’s part of the Standard Technical Panel for UL4600 and to few SAE groups. He’s also active in several conferences either as presenter or chairman/moderator.
Riccardo holds a degree from the University of Pisa (Electronic Engineering), his hometown. He joined Renesas (at the time Hitachi) after a good initial experience in chip design spending, first 11 years in the UK and then, a further 11 years in Germany. Before dedicating his full time to functional safety he worked as a design manager for communication IPs (CAN, LIN, FlexRay, …) contributing also there to several international standards.