Creating connections in the North West

Mira is an Investment Associate at DSW Ventures and is leading the firm’s activities in the Midlands. Mira moved to venture capital from academia following a postdoc and PhD in Chemistry and Life Sciences at the Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College London.

Regional Impact KTM, Innovate UK Business Connect

Bruce is a Regional Impact Specialist at Innovate UK Business Connect, focusing on Clean Growth and Resilient World programmes. His work is driven by key enabling technologies such as AI, 5G, and the optimisation of city and infrastructure systems. With a background in energy infrastructure risk and resilience, Bruce supports innovation-led business growth across the UK’s industrial and R&D landscape. He plays a central role in fostering collaborative relationships that accelerate regional economic development. As part of Innovate UK’s place-based support, he also leads opportunity profiling within the Launchpad Programme and contributes to the national Cluster Impact Strategy.

About Innovate UK Business Connect

Innovate UK Business Connect creates the diverse connections that enable positive change. Their knowledge and expertise enable innovators to transform bright ideas into real-world solutions. Their powerful industry and academic network can guide entrepreneurs, start-ups and companies through the complex challenges of bringing new products, processes and services to market.

Following a long industrial career in manufacturing, logistics and automotive technologies, Mark Joined Innovate UK in 2014 as the Automotive sector lead at The KTN as it was then known. 

Transferring to the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships team in 2017 he now works in the west midlands helping business find innovative solutions to challenging business problems and to exploit profitable opportunities. 

He has supported and managed over 120 projects during this time generating growth and business resilience in a wide variety of sectors.

Tracy is a Senior Manager for the UK Network covering the West Midlands. The UK Network seeks to enhance business finance ecosystems across the UK so smaller businesses, wherever they are, can grow and prosper. It also helps the Bank develop a deeper understanding of small business finance markets in all parts of the UK so that, ultimately, the Bank can improve its support to smaller businesses everywhere.

Tracy joined the British Business Bank from BCRS Business Loans, where she focused on supporting SME’s providing funding solutions as a business development manager as well as engaging with local authorities, Local Enterprise Partnerships and other Key Business Introducers.

Prior to that, Tracy built her career in Personal and Business banking spending ten years with Barclays covering the West Midlands area.

Hemaxi Bhatt is a Credit and Investment Specialist at Innovate UK, with a focus on Innovation Loans and investor partnerships. Her work sits at the intersection of public finance, private capital and high‑risk innovation, supporting businesses to scale through structured loan funding alongside aligned investor engagement.

She works closely with innovative companies, sector teams, investors and delivery partners to assess financial risk, evaluate commercial readiness and structure funding pathways that combine public and private capital. Her role includes strengthening referral mechanisms, improving triage and due diligence processes, and supporting portfolio‑level approaches to managing risk and impact across growth‑stage innovative businesses.

Dr Mingming Tan is a Lecturer in Optical Communications at Aston University and Royal Society Short Industry Fellow. His research focuses on optical communications and optical amplification. 

He has published over 140 papers, delivered over 20 invited talks, and secured over £3.7M research funding. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Access and a TPC member for ECOC 2026.

Dr Stéphane Poigny has more than 25 years’ experience in cosmetics and dermocosmetics, specialising in partnerships, active ingredients and bio-inspired innovation within major French companies. Since 2020, he has been R&D Director France at Mibelle Biochemistry, supporting new business development, academic partnerships and global R&D projects.

He holds a PhD in organic chemistry from Sorbonne University and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. An expert in biomimicry and nature-inspired innovation, he has co-authored more than 100 patents, publications and scientific posters.

Dr Poigny also serves on the board of the French Society of Cosmetology and is a member of the Swiss SCC and reviewer for the IFSCC.

Professor Layi Alatise is a Professor and Royal Society Industry Fellow in Electrical Engineering at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on power electronics, with projects funded by organisations including UKRI, EPSRC, the Royal Society and Innovate UK, alongside collaborations with industry OEMs.

He has authored more than 170 journal and conference publications, supervised 11 PhD students, and received several international honours, including the 2021 Outstanding Paper Award from IEEE Transactions in Industrial Electronics and the 2023 Best Paper Award at CIRED.

Before joining Warwick in 2010, Professor Alatise worked at ATMEL and NXP Semiconductors on semiconductor and power device development for automotive and power supply applications. He became Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2019.

Professor Alatise is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the IET and Senior Member of the IEEE. He holds a BEng and PhD from Newcastle University.

Dr Adrian Burden is the founder of the annual Malvern Festival of Innovation and was a Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Birmingham. He is currently the CEO of a digital certification software-as-a-service company called BlockMark Technologies. 

Adrian is also author of the book Start to Exit: How to maximize the value in your start-up. He has a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge and a D.Phil. in Materials Science from the University of Oxford. 

Dr Dwaipayan Chakrabarti is an Associate Professor in Soft Matter in the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham. His research explores soft matter and advanced materials, using computational and theoretical approaches to study colloidal, liquid crystalline and polymeric systems.

He is also a Visiting Associate Professor at Hiroshima University’s International Institute for Sustainability with Knotted Chiral Meta Matter (WPI-SKCM²), and Editor-in-Chief of the Taylor & Francis journal Liquid Crystals.

Since completing his PhD at the Indian Institute of Science, Dr Chakrabarti has held several prestigious fellowships, including a Marie Curie Incoming International Fellowship, an Oppenheimer Research Fellowship at the University of Cambridge, and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. He also previously held a Royal Society Short Industry Fellowship in partnership with IBM.

Henry Qu is Tech Lead in AI/ML at Allsee Technologies and a PhD researcher in Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. His work focuses on computer vision, multimodal learning and applied generative AI, with a particular interest in transforming research into practical tools for creative and digital display applications.

He leads a collaboration between Allsee and the University of Birmingham exploring AI-generated layered editable posters — enabling visually coherent designs while keeping key elements editable for more flexible creative workflows in digital signage and design.

Dr Jianbo Jiao is an Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, where he leads the MIx (Machine Intelligence + x) research group. His work focuses on machine intelligence, particularly computer vision, machine learning, healthcare and AI for science.

A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and former Royal Society Short Industry Fellow, Dr Jiao has received multiple awards recognising both his research and contributions to the academic community, including Best Paper, Best Reviewer and Amazon Research Awards. He was also a recipient of the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship.

Mostafa Rady is a Senior Engineer at Coherent Corp, based in Paignton, UK, working on advanced optical communication technologies. His work focuses on the design and characterisation of pump lasers for next-generation fibre amplification systems.

Alongside his industry role, he is pursuing a part-time PhD at Aston University, researching 14xx nm pump lasers, semiconductor laser design and fibre Bragg gratings.

Mostafa collaborates with international teams across Europe and Asia and is passionate about bridging academic research and industrial application in photonics and optical communications.

Dr Nilanthy Balakrishnan is a Senior Lecturer in Physics and Co-Programme Director of the MSc Renewable Energy programme at Keele University. She leads the Bala Advanced Materials Lab, researching advanced and low-dimensional materials for energy storage, energy conversion and next-generation electronic technologies.

Her work combines materials synthesis, nanofabrication, advanced characterisation and device physics, with a particular focus on two-dimensional materials, van der Waals heterostructures and sustainable energy materials.

Dr Balakrishnan has secured funding from organisations including EPSRC, the Royal Society and the British Council. She is also a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, an elected committee member within the Institute of Physics, and an active contributor to equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives in research.

Dr Sergey Sergeyev is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies, Aston University. His research focuses on fibre optics, telecommunications and fibre optic sensing.

Before joining Aston University in 2010 through a Marie Curie Fellowship, Dr Sergeyev held academic and industry roles across Belarus, Sweden and Ireland, including positions at Ericsson and the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

He has authored or co-authored more than 230 publications, alongside patents, book chapters and a book in the field of fibre optics.

Professor Vasilios Stavros is Professor of Physical Chemistry and Royal Society Industry Fellow at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on ultrafast laser spectroscopy and the molecular mechanisms underpinning photoprotection.

After studying Chemical Sciences and completing a PhD at King's College London, he undertook postdoctoral research at the university and later at University of California, Berkeley, where he developed a specialism in femtosecond laser spectroscopy. He returned to the UK in 2005 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow and was promoted to Professor in 2017 before joining the University of Birmingham in 2023.