Isabella Hansen works at Combine as a Technical Consultant in the Control Systems team. She studied Electrical Engineering at LTH with a master’s degree in Control systems and Automation. After graduation, she worked within the automation industry, gaining knowledge about PLC programming and Scada systems, mainly within the process industry. After joining Combine, Isabella started working on an automation project for the defense industry, where she could combine her theoretical control systems knowledge with her hands-on automation experience.

What is it like to work as a consultant at Combine?
I really enjoy working as a consultant at Combine it gives me a lot of opportunities to try different types of assignments which helps me decide what path I want to follow. The environment at Combine is very accepting and everyone wants to see you thrive, which makes working here a very fun and positive experience.

How would you describe the culture at Combine?
Combine really cares about their employees and focuses on personal growth. The mindset is to have fun and push yourself to accomplish your personal goals. Since most of the employees have assignments at different companies, Combine arranges a variety of activities where the employees can meet and get to know each other. For example, breakfasts at the office or different types of after works. 

What is the best thing about your profession?
The best thing for me is that I get to work with software and hardware. This gives me the satisfaction of first getting to program a specific function and then seeing how it works in real life. It is the perfect combination of using the theory learned from school and applying it to a real problem. Another thing that I enjoy about this profession, is that it is constantly evolving which means that I get to learn new things every day and adapt this in so many different industries. 

Evert works at Combine as a Technical Consultant in the Control Systems team. He studied Space Engineering (Engineering Physics with space applications) at LTU and holds a Master’s degree in Spacecraft and Instrumentation, where he strengthened his expertise in robotics and automation. He is driven by a passion for solving complex technical problems and seeks out projects that challenge him to grow while applying both academic knowledge and professional experience. In his spare time, Evert is passionate about climbing and enjoys sports that test both body and mind.

What is it like to work as a consultant at Combine?
As a consultant at Combine, working in the inhouse team, I am constantly exposed to a wide variety of technical challenges where I can sharpen, apply, and continue to learn new skills. The inhouse team often works with multiple customer projects in parallel, ranging from developing entirely new features that require research, to designing and building complete systems, or refining existing solutions. The environment at Combine is positive and inspiring, allowing me to thrive at the forefront of today’s technology.

What is the best thing about your profession?
The most rewarding part of working with automatic control is being able to connect software and hardware to create innovative solutions. To succeed, you need a solid understanding of the physics behind the problem and the ability to translate those insights into code. Seeing it all come together when integrated with hardware is truly satisfying. At the same time, creating value for the customer and contributing positively to society with our solutions gives me great joy.

Tell us about an interesting assignment
I am currently Technical Lead in a project that supports the transition to renewable energy and sustainability by constructing wooden wind turbine towers. In this project, I adapt and develop robotic programs for the precise shaping of wooden modules and design control systems for the lamination processes. I enjoy this work because it is pure robotics development, which is what I studied, combined with industrial automation, where I get to apply theory in practice.

Meet Mattias Grundelius, who works at Combine as a Technical Consultant. He has a master degree in electrical engineering with a focus on automatic control, measurment systems and medical technology and a doctors degree in automatic control from Lund University. His thesis work during his doctoral education was to optimize the movement of open liquid packages in a packaging machine. His work was successfull and applied in the industry. He also received a research award for it. After his studies he started working with building automation. He spent 15 years working with high level design of the control engineering tools, PID auto tuning and model predictive control appled to smart buildings. In his spare time enjoys long distance running and road cycling for excersice and hiking for leisure, during the winter a do downhill and backcountry skiing.

What is it like to work as a consultant at Combine?
As a person I am curius and eager to learn new things and to challenge myself. At Combine I have had the opportunity to apply my skills in new domains and using new tools which has been very rewarding.

What is the best thing about your profession?
As a consultant in automatic control you can apply your skills to many differnet problems in different areas which I think is very exciting. Also using automatic control many processes can be improved by applying sensor feedback and optimization.

Tell us about an interesting assignment?
My last assignment was develping and electro mechanical break system for heavy vehicles. There I had the opportunity to apply many tools from my automatic control toolbox to solve the problems of controlling the electrical motor in the actuator, the wheel slip and the estimation of the vehicle state.

Diewertje works at Combine as part of the inhouse team Data Science team. She completed her Bachelor’s degree studying nanoscale processes inside cells, and her Master’s degree focused on the Earth and climate. What both had in common was a strong emphasis on programming, data science, and modelling. After completing her Master’s thesis on precipitation nowcasting, Diewertje became interested in working at Combine through the SUBSIM project, which became her entry point to the company. In this project, she trained models to identify fish and corals, enabling researchers to study the effects of climate regulations on marine life. Today, Diwertje contributes to a wide range of projects across different domains. What ties them together is her main passion: exploring how AI can capture and positively impact our world and climate.

What is it like to work as a consultant at Combine?
Working in the in-house team at Combine offers a slightly different experience compared to being on external assignments. I often work on several customer projects in parallel, which I really enjoy because it exposes me to a broad range of use cases in a short time. Since our team is small and flat in structure, I also get to be involved in every stage of a project, from the initial sales discussions and business modelling, through development, to following up with the customer afterwards. This has allowed me not only to grow as an engineer but also to develop valuable insights into the complete lifecycle of projects.

How would you describe the culture at Combine?
One aspect of the inhouse team I value highly is our collaborative mindset. Together we build the “Combine Technology Toolbox”, where we generalize and reuse code across projects. This not only makes our solutions easier to maintain and more powerful for future work but also challenges us engineers to maintain a high level of quality in everything we develop. For me, this combination of teamwork, shared learning, and technical ambition captures the spirit of Combine’s culture very well.

Tell us about an interesting assignment.
The projects I’ve been part of have taken me to many different fields: using AI to plan how ships should be loaded, predicting fruit and vegetable sales, recognizing corals and fishes in underwater images, and even preventing urban water systems from overflowing. Each project is fascinating in its own right, but what excites me the most is discovering how similar data science and AI techniques can be applied across such different domains. Of course, every project faces its own data challenges, but they also bring together motivated people with deep expertise to overcome them. Being able to connect insights across projects and transfer knowledge from one domain to another is what I find most rewarding in my work.