Networking event for Industry Fellows and Entrepreneurs in Residence

Dame Sue Ion GBE FRS FREng is Hon President of the National Skills Academy for Nuclear. She was previously Chairman of the UK Nuclear Innovation Research Advisory Board (NIRAB). She represents the UK on a number of international review and oversight committees for the nuclear sector including the Euratom Science and Technology Committee which she chaired until late 2018. She was the only non-US member of the US Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee on which she has served from 2005-2020.She currently serves as a member of the Office of Nuclear Regulation Independent Advisory Panel.

Sue spent 27 years with British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) rising to the position of Chief Technology Officer in 1992, a post she held until 2006 when she assumed a number of mainly voluntary roles in Science and Engineering, including membership of the UK Council for Science and Technology and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). She was Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2002-2008 and chaired its MacRobert Committee 2013-2019. Sue was Deputy Chair of the Board of the University of Manchester until September 2018 and currently serves on the Board of the University of Central Lancashire.

Her core expertise is in materials science and engineering associated with the nuclear sector. Sue is a member of the Chief Scientific Advisor for Wales’s Science and Innovation Advisory Council. She has been a Visiting Professor in the Department of Materials at Imperial College since 2006, holds an Honorary Professorship at the University of Manchester and is now Chair of the Royal Society Science, Industry and Translation Committee.

Alex van Someren is Managing Partner of the Seed Funds at Amadeus. He is a director or an observer on the boards of the Seed Fund portfolio companies. Alex has a current investment focus on Big Data, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, Healthcare IT, the Internet of Things and Medical Technology. Alex left school to join Acorn Computers in the 1980s where he was extensively involved in the BBC Microcomputer project. He subsequently co-founded ANT Ltd in 1990 to produce networking products, including Web Browser software licensed to the Oracle Corporation. ANT plc was listed on the London AIM market (AIM:ANTP) in 2005 and is now positioned in the embedded software market for IPTV. In 1996 he co-founded nCipher with venture capital backing to develop internet security products using advanced cryptography. The company became a world leader in IT security, counting major banks, finance companies and governments among its customers. He subsequently raised a total of £14 million in venture capital funding before he led the company to a listing on the London Stock Exchange in 2000 (LSE:NCH) at a £350 million valuation. nCipher plc was sold to Thales SA in 2008.

Lampros is currently leading on digital services at the National Centre for Universities and Businesses. Starting off as a chemical engineer and quality manager in industry, Lampros has been working on knowledge exchange projects for the past 15 years in R&D roles in factories or knowledge transfer roles (KTN, RSC), as well as conducting research at Cambridge University. An engineer at heart, who loves to explore complex industry problems and aims at putting digital knowledge exchange tools at the hands of scientists, engineers and managers in the UK.

Chris Blackman is a Professor in Inorganic Chemistry at UCL and has 100 peer-reviewed publications in environmental monitoring, health and energy applications. He has published high impact articles on gas sensing in Advanced Functional Materials [A] and an invited article for an “Emerging Investigators” special edition of Chemical Communications [B], and was a co-recipient of the 2016 PW Allen Award from The Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences for an article on, “Analysis of transferred fragrances and its forensic implications” [C]. He has collaborated with groups at Imperial, QMUL and Southampton, and groups in Spain, Belgium and Slovenia on programmes in materials synthesis, characterization and functional testing. He has a background of industrial collaboration (Pilkington, Applied Materials) and developing intellectual property (US2012/0080092, WO2008/009967) and is currently working with several UK based companies (Alphasense, McGowan Sensor Labs, Applied Nanodetectors, CodiKoat) to exploit vapour synthesis for industrial manufacture of products. 

Dr Tom Shire is a Lecturer in Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Glasgow and a Chartered Civil Engineer. 

Tom carried out his PhD research at Imperial College London from 2010-2014, focusing on modelling of granular filters for embankment dams. The work was awarded the Unwin Prize for the best PhD in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. From August 2016 to March 2017 Tom was a Research Associate in the Geotechnics section at Imperial College London, focusing on laboratory testing of unsaturated soils.

Recent work has included laboratory testing for safety of dam materials and the Royal Society Short Industry Fellowship concentrating on the remote monitoring of embankment dams. 

Matt is a comparative toxicologist and pharmacologist working primarily on fish models for the last 23 years. After his PhD at the University of Manchester, he undertook post-doctoral work on biochemical biomarkers of pollution in fish at the University of Birmingham, before joining the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca as an environmental toxicologist. During his time at AstraZeneca, he gained an increasing interest in the use of zebrafish as an alternative model for preclinical drug safety and efficacy assessment and this work has continued since his move to the University of Exeter in 2014. His work with the Royal Society started with a Short Industry Fellowship on evaluating the potential use of CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene editing in embryo-larval zebrafish to support early target Validation in AstraZeneca. This has since evolved into a full Industry Fellowship (commenced May 2022), in which he is using AstraZeneca-developed novel gene editing technology to create more representative adult zebrafish models of human heart failure and chronic kidney disease.

Dr Blesson Varghese is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the Queen's University Belfast, a Royal Society Short Industry Fellow to British Telecommunications plc and the Principal Investigator of the Edge Computing Hub in Belfast that is funded by Rakuten Mobile, Japan. He was an Honorary Lecturer at the University of St Andrews and an alumnus of the Royal Society of Edinburgh Scottish Crucible. His research tackles systems-based challenges for unlocking the scientific and societal opportunities in the next Internet frontier, Edge Computing.

Professor Anatoly V. Zayats is the head of the Experimental Biophysics and Nanotechnology Group at the Department of Physics, King’s College London, where he also leads Nano-optics and Near-field Spectroscopy Laboratory. He graduated and received PhD in Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. His current research interests are in the areas of nano-optics, scanning probe microscopy, nanophotonics and plasmonics, metamaterials, nonlinear optics and spectroscopy, surface plasmons and polaritons, and optical properties of surfaces, thin films, semiconductors and low-dimensional structures. He is a holder of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Optical Society of America, SPIE and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

I am a computer scientist with a long research track record in automated planning, a field of Artificial Intelligence. I am a senior scientist at Schlumberger Cambridge Research, applying automated planning and scheduling to problems that arise in oil field services. Before joining Schlumberger, I was a professor of computer science at King’s College London, and before that at the University of Strathclyde.

Nessa has just completed two and a half years as an EiR at the University of Oxford, supporting innovations in the medical and health sectors. She's had a very varied career, originally following the classic academic route at Imperial College, where she left her position as a Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology in 2001 to join the biotech industry.  Following nearly 15 years in biotech and big pharma, where she specialised in developing collaborative approaches in emerging areas of biology, she spent five years building the first internationally accredited course in technology transfer delivered in China, training hundreds of professionals. Nessa has provided consultancy to a number of the UK's leading PRSEs, and has served on/chaired panels and schemes for MRC, BBSRC and UKRI. She is a non-executive director for two businesses and the author of three popular science books.

With 25+ years’ experience in executive and non-executive roles within both the private and public sectors Pete has developed the ability to maximise the interaction between the research and industrial domains.  Initially trained in chemistry and microbiology Pete retains a particular interest in the life sciences. From heading the IP strategy in a biotech to launching a series of spin-out companies from universities Pete has worked on a diverse set of technologies; from bone grafts to pollination and various molecular biology applications.

Pete has recently been appointed a Royal Society Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Swansea University where he is actively providing mentoring and is involved in the genesis of more spin-outs.

James was one of the RS EIRs at the University of Southampton from 2018 to 2021. He was sponsored by the University of Southampton’s Institute for Life Sciences. During this time he mentored a range of start-ups and started the commercial literacy course, which gives academic entrepreneurs a grounding in business issues.  

Over the last 20 years he has led a range of turnarounds of technology companies in a range of sectors including genomics, drug delivery, health IT, nanotechnology, veterinary MRI and sound and vibration instrumentation. He has chaired or been an NED on Octopus Venture Capital Trusts since 2004.

His earlier corporate career was with Zeneca Agrochemicals (now Syngenta) where he held a range of international commercial management positions, and before Zeneca he worked with aid organisations in the field in Nepal and the Sahel. 

James has a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge and an MBA from INSEAD.