Team

Humphrey Battcock was previously head of Europe of Advent International, which he joined in 1994. Advent International is one of the world’s leading private equity firms with operations in 10 countries. During his tenure, the firm increased its assets under management from £200 million to £30 billion. Prior to Advent, Humphrey was at Trinity Capital Partners, a UK-focused, technology venture capital firm.

Humphrey is a chartered accountant, with an MBA from London Business School, an MSc from London School of Economics and a Physics degree from Cambridge University.

Humphrey is a panel member of the Competition and Market Authority and a member of the government’s Industrial Advisory Board, Cambridge University’s Campaign Board and the Downing College Investment Committee. He is a trustee of Sadler’s Wells, the What Works Centre for Homelessness Impact and the Institute for Research in Schools

Edward Benthall has been involved with CIC since its inception. He was Chairman of Cambridge Enterprise Ltd, the University of Cambridge’s commercialisation arm, between 2010 and 2014. Before that he was Chairman of the Campaign Council for the University’s 800th Anniversary Campaign.

Until April 2012, Edward was a Partner of Charterhouse Capital Partners, a leading UK private equity firm. He was a member of the investment team of Charterhouse from 1991 to 2009. During his tenure, Charterhouse raised six funds totalling around €13 billion. In this period Charterhouse realised over 40 investments (made in the same period) achieving a gross internal return rate in excess of 40%.

Edward is a Chartered Accountant and a graduate of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge.

Edward is the Chair of the Eden Trust, the charity that owns the Eden Project. 

Clive Birch is a retired PricewaterhouseCoopers’ partner. Clive’s role at PricewaterhouseCoopers was that of an auditor and reporting accountant and his industry specialism was in early stage technology and healthcare companies. He was also partner in charge of the Cambridge office for 15 years up to 2010, during which time he was responsible for all aspects of that stand alone business.

The majority of Clive's clients were technology and healthcare companies and, as the partner responsible for them, he not only looked after their audit needs but also helped them deal with the rigors of setting up systems and processes, dealing with outside stakeholders and corporate governance. He was also part of the teams involved in fund raising and listing those clients on various markets.

Prior to moving to Cambridge in 1984, Clive worked for Coopers & Lybrand in Vancouver and London and had exposure to corporate recovery work which gave him hands-on experience of running a number of businesses.

Clive is a Governor of Birkbeck College, part of London University, and is Chairman of Pigeon Land Limited and Pigeon Land 2 Limited.

Rowan brings more than twenty years’ experience as an executive business leader. Over her career she has served on multiple corporate boards and executed numerous partnerships and investments.

She is a co-founder of Initiate Studios, a life sciences incubator founded in 2020, where she partners with entrepreneurs to launch new companies. Previously Dr. Chapman served as Head of Johnson & Johnson Innovation (NYSE: JNJ) for Western North America, Australia and New Zealand. Prior to that, she led teams at General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), including as Head of Healthcare Investing at GE Ventures and Head of Precision Diagnostics at GE Healthcare. Before GE, she held operational roles in early and growth-stage startups and was a Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures for over 11 years, gaining extensive experience as an investor and board member for a wide variety of life science technology- and data-enabled companies. She was an early employee at Rosetta Inpharmatics (IPO, then acquired by Merck & Co.) and Incyte Genomics.

Rowan holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and a BA in Biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and carried out post-doctoral research at UCSF. 

Professor Anne Ferguson-Smith is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research, University of Cambridge, since January 2021; from January 2022 she becomes the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and International Partnerships. She is the Arthur Balfour Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge, since 2015. Formally, the University’s Head of the Department of Genetics until December 2020. She became the President of the Genetics Society in 2021, and is a member of the UKRI BBSRC Council.

She is a mammalian developmental geneticist and epigeneticist. An expert on genomic imprinting, her team studies the epigenetic control of genome function with particular emphasis on epigenetic inheritance. Her group is made up of both experimental and computational scientists and current research focuses on three themes: (i) Stem cells and the epigenetic programme, (ii) Functional genomics and epigenomics, and (iii) the interaction between the environment and development, health & disease within and across generations.

She was elected to EMBO in 2006, to the UK Academy of Medical Sciences and the Society of Biology in 2012 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2017. In 2014 she was as awarded the Women in Science Heirloom Award for contributions to life sciences and in 2019 was awarded the Feldberg Prize. In 2021 she was awarded the Buchanan Medal by The Royal Society. She is a Fellow of Darwin College, University of Cambridge.

Professor Andy Neely, OBE, is Senior Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. His previous appointments include Head of the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge, the Royal Academy of Engineering Professor of Complex Services at the University of Cambridge, the Deputy Director of the Advanced Institute of Management Research, a UK national research programme and the Director of the Centre for Business Performance at Cranfield University.

During his career, Andy has founded several major research centres and groups, including the Cambridge Service Alliance and the Centre for Digital Built Britain, both at the University of Cambridge and the Centre for Business Performance at Cranfield University. He is co-founder of Anmut, the data valuation specialists, a Non-Executive Director at the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and a member of the Board of Trustees of the American University of Sharjah.

He has written over 100 books and articles, including “Measuring Business Performance", published by the Economist and "The Performance Prism", published by the Financial Times. In 2020 he was awarded an OBE for services to research and university-industry collaboration.

Nick has over 15 years’ experience advising institutional, corporate and individual investors and the companies they invest into, especially in the technology and life sciences sectors.

Nick qualified into the private equity team of a Magic Circle law firm and has been seconded to the legal department of Goldman Sachs. Prior to joining CIC, Nick was a senior associate at an international law firm.

Nick attended the College of Law and BPP Law School in London and holds an MA in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford. He is a solicitor admitted to practise in England and Wales.

Rob has more than 25 years of professional and commercial experience providing strategic, financial and corporate finance advice to boards and shareholders, especially in the life science, technology and technology consulting industries.
His previous roles have included CFO of Altacor, an ophthalmic specialty pharmaceutical company, CFO of Warwick Ventures, the Technology Transfer Office of Warwick University, CFO of an AIM listed drug development company and Senior Manager, Corporate Finance at PwC. Rob was also a consultant to Lumora, a molecular diagnostics company spun-out from the University of Cambridge.

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.

Andrew Williamson is the Managing Partner of CIC and focuses on technology investments.

Andrew’s background combines R&D, start-up formation and technology investing. Before joining CIC he spent ten years in venture investing at Physic Ventures in San Francisco and True North Venture Partners in Chicago. Before moving into Venture Capital, Andrew led a research group applying High Performance Computing to materials science at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Andrew has an MA and PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Andrew manages CIC's investments in Audio Analytic, AudioTelligence, Origami Energy, PragmatIC, Prowler.io, and Riverlane.

Dr David Braben OBE is the CEO of AIM quoted Frontier Developments plc, a major games developer and publisher headquartered on the Science Park in Cambridge that he founded in 1994.

David has been in the games industry for over 35 years having studied Natural Sciences at Jesus College, Cambridge, specialising in Electrical Science in his final year, before going on to study Computer Science. David is a BAFTA Fellow (one of only 96 ever awarded), is a Fellow of the Royal Academy fof Engineering, was a co-founder and still a Director/Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology. David is an active investor in technology companies.

Ted Briscoe has been a member of staff at the Computer Laboratory since 1989, a Reader since 2000, and Professor of Computational Linguistics since 2004. His broad research interests are computational and theoretical linguistics and automated speech and language processing. He directed and was heavily involved in the teaching of the MPhil in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology, taught jointly with the Engineering Department. He currently teaches similar modules as part of the department's MPhil in Advanced Computer Science.

From 1990 until 1996 he was an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow undertaking research at Macquarie University in Sydney, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Xerox European Research Centre in Grenoble, as well as at the Computer Laboratory.

His specific research interests include (nearly-)deterministic, statistical, and robust parsing techniques, acquiring lexical information from electronic textual corpora and dictionaries, defaults and constraint-based approaches to linguistic description, exploiting prosody and punctuation during parsing, models of human language learning and parsing, and evolutionary simulations of language variation and change.

He has developed numerous applications building on this research through iLexIR Ltd, a consultancy company he cofounded in 2004 -- for example, automated assessment of and error detection in English language learners' texts. In 2009, iLexIR spun-out Swiftkey, maker of the world's most popular predictive keyboard for smartphones. In 2013, he co-founded English Language iTutoring Ltd and was its chief scientist until 2019.

He has published over 100 research articles and four books. He has been been Principal/Co-Investigator or Coordinator of seventeen EU and UK funded projects since 1985. He was a senior editor of Computer Speech and Language and was founding director of and is a Principal Investigator in the Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (Alta) Institute.

Charles Cotton is Founder and Chairman of Cambridge Phenomenon Ltd. He co-authored The Cambridge Phenomenon 50 Years of Innovation and Enterprise and The Cambridge Phenomenon: Global Impact. He is a Director of Frontier Developments Plc; XMOS Ltd; Cambridge Enterprise and is a member of its Investment Committees; Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Panel of Cambridge Innovation Capital; Deputy Chairman of Cambridge Ahead; a member of the Board of Trustees of the American University of Sharjah and AUS Enterprises.

Previously he was a Director of Solarflare Communications Inc. which was sold to Xilinx Inc. in August 2019; a Supervisory Board member of Euronext Amsterdam listed, Tele Atlas which was sold to TomTom for $4.3Bn in 2008; Executive Chairman of NASDAQ listed, GlobespanVirata Inc.; and CEO of Virata Corp. which he took public on NASDAQ in 1999 and achieved a market cap of more than $5Bn at its peak.

Prior to that he was President of Thermal Scientific Inc, and a Director of London Stock Exchange listed Thermal Scientific Ltd. His engagement in high technology dates back to 1983 when he was Sales and Marketing Director at Sinclair Research Ltd. After graduating, he worked in the automotive industry at British Leyland and Ford.

He holds a BA Hons in Physics from Oxford University and is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Dr. Dreismann, is a seasoned executive with more than 35 years' experience in the life sciences and healthcare industries and is regarded as a pioneer in the early adoption of polymerase chain reaction technique, one of the most ubiquitous technologies in molecular biology and genetics research today.

He earned a master of science degree in biology and his doctor of philosophy degree in microbiology/molecular biology from Westfaelische Wilhelms University in Muenster, Germany. Heiner holds a post-doctoral fellowship at the French Center for Nuclear Research in Saclay, France and then joined the biotechnology company Roehm and Haas in Darmstadt, Germany where he headed the genetic research and development effort to improve the yield of enzyme manufacturing fungal and bacterial strains. He then joined F. Hoffmann La Roche AG and held various national and international management positions including President and CEO of Roche Molecular Systems in Pleasanton, California (2000-2006).

Dr. Dreismann currently serves on the boards of several public and private life sciences and healthcare companies in the United States, Europe and Israel. 

Professor Sir Richard Friend FRS is in the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge. His research encompasses the physics, materials science and engineering of semiconductor devices made with carbon-based semiconductors, particularly polymers. His research advances have shown that carbon-based semiconductors have significant applications in LEDs, solar cells, lasers, and electronics. These have been developed and exploited through a number of spin-off companies.  His current research interests are directed to novel schemes – including ideas inspired by recent insights into nature’s light harvesting – that seek to improve the performance and cost of solar cells.

Sir Richard is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering.  He has received many international awards for his research, including Laureate of the Millennium Prize for Technology (2010), the Harvey Prize of the Israel Institute of Technology (2011) and the von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society (2015). He was knighted for "Services to Physics" in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, 2003.

Martin Frost CBE is a recognised commercial leader, with over 20 years’ experience in starting, financing and successfully scaling technology and life science businesses around Cambridge.

Most recently Martin co-founded CMR Surgical in 2014 and as CEO was recognised as UK ‘Disruptor’ of the year in the 2019 Entrepreneur of the Year awards and ‘Executive of the Year’ at the 2019 MedTech Insight awards recognising his success in taking CMR from inception to global commercialisation with its surgical robot, Versius. To scale CMR, Martin raised over £250m, a record for any private European medical devices business.

Previously Martin has held a number of C-suite positions including CEO and CFO of Sagentia, the leading technology development company based in Cambridge, which he listed on the London Stock Exchange. Martin qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant and graduated from Cambridge University.

Martin currently advises and serves on the board of several early and growth stage companies across technology and life science sectors in the UK.

Tim Garnett has over thirty years experience in the pharmaceutical Industry in both the United Kingdom and United States, most recently as Chief Medical Officer of Eli Lilly and Company from 2008 to 2021. He has been involved in the development of multiple drugs through early and late phase clinical development and regulatory approval and well as heading up Lilly’s drug safety function prior to becoming Chief Medical Officer and was formerly the Chair of the R&D Leadership Forum for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).

He graduated in Medicine from St. George’s Hospital Medical School and specialized in Obstetrics and Gynaecology becoming a Member then Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.

Dr Garnett retired from Eli Lilly in 2021 and is now sits as a Board member of several innovative pharmaceutical companies in the US and Europe.

Adam was previously Co-Head of GAM Systematic, having been CEO of Cantab Capital Partners, a technology-driven systematic asset manager located in Cambridge, and acquired by Zurich-based GAM Asset Management in October 2016. Before Cantab, between 2003-2009, Adam held the role of COO, Partner and a member of the Management Committee of Lansdowne Partners, which grew to become one of the world’s leading equity hedge fund firms. Prior to that, Adam had held a variety of senior roles in the equity capital markets.

Adam holds a BSc (Econ) with First Class Honours from the London School of Economics and an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge. Adam is also a member of the board of trustees at the Cambridge Arts Theatre. He has been involved with CIC since its inception.

Tabitha is the co founder of CogX, a festival and online platform. Alongside CogX, Tabitha is the chair of the UK government's AI Council and a member of the DCMS Digitial Economy Council and on the TechUK board. A serial entrepreneur, Tabitha was the co-founder of video distribution company Rightster (IPO 2011.)

Tabitha is the author of How To Talk To Robots - A Girlsguide to a World Dominated by AI. She's also an advisor to Tortoise Media, The Stack, TeensInAI, Raspberry Pi, CarbonRe, Monumo, Cambridge Innovation Capital and The Alan Turing Institute.

Erik Langaker is currently Chair of PragmatIC. Erik has an extensive background of developing and commercialising technology businesses, with 30 years’ international experience in private equity and entrepreneurial ventures. He has been an active investor and Chair, or Board Director, in 25 companies, many in complementary sectors to PragmatIC. He brings a strong track record in chairing public companies and raising capital, for example recently leading CMR Surgical Ltd to a valuation of over £1 billion.

John was CFO of DisplayLink Corp, a market leading USB graphics software and semiconductor business, from 2011 to July 2020, when it was acquired by Synaptics Inc. Starting with Sinclair, over the last 35 years, he has been actively involved in the Cambridge technology scene and has held senior management roles and been an investor in a number of start-ups, many of which have resulted in successful exits or IPOs. Previously, John was CEO of Velocix, a leading provider of content delivery network solutions, and successfully exited the business to Alcatel-Lucent. For the past twelve years, John has been Chairman of the Cambridge Enterprise's Investment Committee, which currently manages technology assets of circa £65 million and which has a successful track record of both investment and exit over this period.

Steve Leonard is an international leader in the information technology industry with more than 25 years of experience building hardware, software, and managed-services companies in Asia and Europe. Steve also has broad experience in government, holding senior roles through which he created and implemented national programs for an innovation-based economy.

Steve currently serves as CEO of Singularity University (SU), a Silicon Valley based global organisation that enables leaders to understand how future technologies will impact their companies and countries, and engages those leaders to help them shape that future. SU seeks to positively impact one billion people through the collective capabilities of the entrepreneurs, investors, corporations and governments with which it works.

Before joining SU, Steve created SGInnovate, a private company wholly-owned by the Singapore Government, to help entrepreneurial scientists create investable deeptech startups. Recognising that Singapore has a top-ranked education system and a pool of world class scientific research talent, Steve envisioned forging a specialised mini-ecosystem of scientists, investors, corporations, venture builders, and government leaders around the shared goal of generating new economic value. During Leonard’s tenure as its Founding CEO, SGInnovate built an engaged community of 35,000 people, held 600 discussion events around science and technology, and launched more than 90 deep tech startups into which it invested $50M.

Prior to founding SGInnovate, Steve served as the Executive Deputy Chairman of the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA), a Singapore Government statutory board overseen by the Ministry of Communications and Information. And prior to that he was a senior executive in Europe and Asia for several global technology companies. Steve serves as an Independent Non-Executive Director on the main board of Singapore Post Ltd (SingPost), an international e-commerce and logistics operator, and as an INED for AsiaSat, a HK-based satellite operator. He is an alumnus of a two-year MIT Sloan School of Management program aimed at nation-scale entrepreneurial and innovation-led ecosystems.

Mark Lewisohn is one of the most senior bankers at UBS Investment Bank in London with over 30 years' experience at the firm. He is Vice Chairman of Investment Banking EMEA and for many years was Global Head of TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunication) Investment Banking.

Mark has been an external member of the Council of the University of Cambridge since 2013 and is currently Deputy Chair of Council.

Mark is a graduate of Christ’s College, Cambridge and qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Price Waterhouse.

Ruth March is Senior Vice President, Precision Medicine & Biosamples, R&D Oncology, at AstraZeneca. 

Ruth March is an experienced Board member, senior industry leader and scientific investment advisor with experience in biopharmaceuticals, diagnostics, genomics and precision medicine. She combines deep scientific and technology expertise with board and committee experience in both private and public sectors.

As Senior Vice President of Precision Medicine and Biosamples, she is accountable for the development of novel companion and complementary diagnostics for AstraZeneca’s drug projects in all therapy areas and phases of drug development, leads more than 240 diagnostics and biosamples experts globally, and has successfully launched 48 diagnostic tests for five Precision Medicine drugs.

Dr March has a proven record of driving innovation in Precision Medicine including the world’s first drug label based on circulating tumour DNA (Iressa); the first FDA approval of a lab-based companion diagnostic (gBRCA for Lynparza); the first diagnostic approval based on both ctDNA and tissue testing (Tagrisso); the first point of care diagnostic for respiratory disease (EDN). She has gained major investment for a world-leading pharmaceutical genomics initiative that is successfully discovering novel drug targets proceeding into the R&D pipeline.

In the Covid-19 pandemic, she set up an end-to-end global programme to test AstraZeneca key employees by PCR, antigen and antibody methods in 3 major markets in 18 working days, keeping the workplace safe and maintaining the supply chain of critical medicines. This programme has now completed over 60,000 PCR assessments.

Dr March is passionate about mentoring, diversity, early career researchers and innovation in life sciences, establishing important collaborations with institutions such as the University of Cambridge, FinnGen and the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Osman Mardin is the Managing Director of Sardis Capital.

In an advisory career of over 30 years, Osman has served multiple Corporations, Investors, and Entrepreneurs in the US and Europe on Strategic Advisory, Mergers & Acquisitions and Private Financings, specialising in the last 25 years in the Life Sciences and Information Technology areas. Prior to founding Sardis Capital in 2002 in London, Osman was with Robertson Stephens 1998-2002 (San Francisco and London) as Managing Director and head of M&A for Europe & Israel. Prior to Robertson Stephens, Osman was Executive Director of Lazard Frères & Cie. (Paris).

Osman has a BA from Trinity College, Cambridge, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Jonathan Milner, co-founder and currently Deputy Chairman of Abcam plc, is an experienced entrepreneur and investor and is passionate about supporting UK healthcare and high-tech start-ups. He has provided considerable investment and support to over 60 companies and has assisted three technology companies to IPO on AIM.

Jonathan gained his doctorate in Molecular Genetics at Leicester University after graduating in Applied Biology at Bath University. From 1992–95, he was a post-doctoral researcher at Bath, following which he worked at the University of Cambridge in the laboratory of Professor Tony Kouzarides researching the molecular basis of breast cancer. He identified the market opportunity for supplying high-quality antibodies to support protein interaction studies and, in 1998, founded Abcam with David Cleevely and Professor Kouzarides.

Jonathan is currently Chairman of Axol Bioscience, Camallergy Limited, and PhoreMost Limited and a non-executive director of Syndicate Room Limited, Repositive Limited, Elpis Biomedical Limited, Shift Biosciencs Limited and HealX Limited.

Mike was one of the founders of Arm in 1990 and retired in 2019. During this time he served as VP Marketing, VP Business Development and from 2000 as Chief Technology Officer and was on the board of directors. Before joining ARM, he worked for Orbis Computers and at Acorn Computers he was part of the original Arm development team.

He is a trustee of the Centre for Computer History, the David Parr House and is a Royal College of Art Scaleup Business Fellow and member of the IEEE Business Liaison committee.

Kieran Murphy is Chairperson of Gamma Biosciences, a KKR owned Life Sciences tools business, focused on advanced therapies. He is also Chairperson of SPT Labtech, an EQT owned laboratory equipment company. Kieran has a track record of building and leading businesses in biopharma and life sciences, diagnostics, pharmaceuticals and MedTech. Until December 2021, he was President and CEO of GE Healthcare, a $18bn revenue MedTech company, with market leading positions in diagnostic imaging and critical care.

Sir Keith Peters’ research has been on elucidation of immunological mechanisms underlying diseases of kidney and blood vessels, which has led to new treatments of these diseases.  He was Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge from 1987 to 2005, where he was also head of the School of Clinical Medicine.  Under Sir Keith’s leadership, Cambridge has become a major centre for clinical research, complementing the University’s longstanding strengths in basic biomedical science.  He is a fellow of the Royal Society, a founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and its second President. 

From 2006-2008 Sir Keith was Interim Director of the MRC’s National Institute for Medical Research and initiated discussions which led to the establishment of the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation, the Francis Crick Institute.  Sir Keith is currently a consultant in Clinical Science and Translational Medicine for the Institute.  

From 2005-2016 Sir Keith was a Senior Consultant to the President of Pharmaceuticals R&D at GlaxoSmithKline and has served on the science advisory boards of various biotechnology companies including Cambridge Antibody Technology.

Dr Andy Richards CBE is an entrepreneur specialising in healthcare and life sciences. He is currently Chairman of Congenica Limited, Arecor Limited, Abcodia Limited and Closed Loop Medicine Limited as well as being a Director of Ieso Digital Health Limited and Owlstone Medical Limited. He was a founder of Chiroscience Group plc and an executive director through its merger with Celltech plc in 1999.

Andy has a track record as a founder, director and active investor in more than 25 innovative healthcare and life science companies, including Vectura and Arakis. He is Chairman of the Babraham Campus, a director of the commercial board of CRUK, Chair of the CRUK Seed fund and a director of The Scale-Up Institute . Andy is a graduate of the University of Cambridge with a PhD in Chemistry and is also a founder member of the Cambridge Angels.

Living in Boston, MA, John Scarisbrick is a proven global technology leader with extensive board and advisory experience from high-growth start-ups to the largest enterprises. John was Chief Executive Officer of FTSE250 CSR PLC between 2005 and 2007 and served on the Board of FTSE100 ARM Holdings plc, the world's leading microprocessor IP company, from 2001 to 2011. Previously John worked at Texas Instruments for 25 years in a variety of leadership roles in France, the UK and the USA. He was Senior Vice President responsible for all aspects of Texas Instrument’s $5 billion+ world-wide ASP chip business. He also served as President of TI Europe and earlier led the team that created TI’s Digital Signal Processing business. Currently John serves as an Independent Director at Cambridge (Massachusetts) based ETA Wireless which develops, licenses and makes IP & devices which transform the power consumption of 5G cellular devices.

Dr Christian Steinruecken is a member of the Machine Learning Group at the Department of Engineering, and associate faculty at the Cambridge ELLIS unit. He received his PhD from the Cavendish Laboratory under the supervision of Prof Sir David J.C. MacKay. Christian is CTO and co-founder of Invenia Labs, a company specialising in optimisation and machine learning for large-scale environmental applications.

Christian is a technical and strategic advisor to several companies, including start-ups in Cambridge and London.

William Tunstall-Pedoe was the founder of Cambridge start-up Evi (formerly True Knowledge), a company which has deep technology around understanding natural language and automatically answering questions on any topic. Following its acquisition, the technology became an integral part of Amazon’s Alexa and William held a senior role in the team that defined, built and launched Amazon Echo working with hundreds of scientists and engineers. Evi is now the Cambridge subsidiary of Amazon, employing hundreds of scientists and engineers locally from multiple projects including Alexa and Prime Air.

William is now an active angel investor and fellow of the Creative Destruction Lab, a Toronto based incubator for AI start-ups where he helps many tens of early stage machine learning businesses.

William has a first class honours degree, studying Computer Science at Churchill College, Cambridge. Less serious projects include a commercial chess-playing program, the first and only software which can solve and explain cryptic crossword clues and the AI anagram-generating software which was used by Dan Brown to create the anagrams that were integral to the plot of the Da Vinci Code book and movie.

Sir Gregory Winter is the former Master of Trinity College, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. He is best known for his research and inventions relating to therapeutic antibodies made at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

Sir Gregory has founded three biotech companies based on his inventions: Cambridge Antibody Technology in 1989 (floated on LSE in 1997, then bought by AstraZeneca), Domantis in 2000 (bought by GSK) and Bicycle Therapeutics in 2009 (floated on NASDAQ in 2019).