By Bhavish Lekh, Co-founder & CEO

I first met John years ago when we were both working in the CRO sector. We clicked immediately — not over a conference table or a Teams call, but over lunchtime walks around Green Park in Reading. Long loops where we'd talk about feasibility, where the industry was getting it wrong, and what better looked like.

Those conversations stayed with me. Long after we went our separate ways — me deeper into feasibility operations, John into senior leadership and eventually to Pfizer — we kept in touch. The walks stopped, but the conversations didn't. And honestly, a lot of the thinking that eventually became Aurora started in those conversations.

So when I tell you that John Hillier has joined the Aurora Analytica Advisory Board, I hope you understand why it feels like more than an announcement to me. It feels like a circle closing.

Who John Is

John is currently Head of Feasibility Strategy & Site Intelligence at Pfizer — and he continues in that role. His position on our Advisory Board is alongside his work there.

He's spent over 25 years in clinical development. At Pfizer, he leads end-to-end country and site feasibility strategies, analytics capability building, strategic site partnerships, and due diligence across global development programmes. His focus has always been on improving decision quality, accelerating recruitment timelines, and enabling scalable, evidence-driven trial delivery.

Before Pfizer, John held senior leadership roles in the CRO sector, including Global Head of Feasibility, where he built and led global analytics teams supporting protocol design, enrolment modelling, and strategy execution.

He's seen this industry from every angle. CRO side. Pharma side. Strategic. Operational. And he's spent his career trying to make the same thing better — the quality of decisions that determine whether a trial succeeds or fails.

Why It Matters for Aurora

When I built the Aurora Suite, I built it to solve a specific problem. Feasibility teams making critical decisions under impossible time pressure, working with fragmented data and disconnected tools. I knew what better looked like because I'd spent a decade wishing it existed.

But knowing what better looks like from one vantage point isn't enough. I led feasibility operations across CROs. John has led feasibility strategy at one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. Those are different perspectives on the same problem, and both need to be in the room when you're building a platform that serves the whole industry.

That's what John brings. Not just experience — perspective. The kind you only get from 25 years of doing this work at the highest level and constantly pushing for better ways to do it.

What John Will Do

As an Advisor, John will help shape the next phase of the Aurora Suite. That means contributing to platform innovation, refining how our trial-optimisation workflows serve real teams, and strengthening how feasibility and site-strategy professionals are supported in making confident, data-driven decisions.

Every one of those areas maps to something we hear from our customers. They tell us the Aurora Suite feels like it was built by people who understand their work — and that's because it was. John's involvement means we keep building that way, with even deeper insight from the pharma side of the table.

What Comes Next

Aurora Analytica is growing. We're onboarding new enterprise customers, building new modules, and expanding into new markets. Having John on our Advisory Board as we enter this next phase gives me real confidence that what we deliver will continue to meet the standard our customers expect.

If you're in feasibility, clinical strategy, or trial operations and you've ever felt like the tools available to you weren't built for the way you actually work — that's exactly why we exist. And it's exactly why people like John are helping us build it.

I'd love to show you what we've built. Get in touch or book a demo — I'd be happy to walk you through it.

Welcome to the Advisory Board, John. It's been a long time coming.

Bhavish Lekh is the Co-founder and CEO of Aurora Analytica. Connect with him on LinkedIn or reach out at bhav@aurora-analytica.com.