Mentoring Women for Spinouts Success

Kate Barnard

Kate Barnard is Founder & Director, Enjoy The Air Limited and Director of WhatBox Consulting Limited. Kate brings together skills as an engineer and entrepreneur built on 22 years as manager in the engineering and technology group in one of the most successful innovators globally. Kate is an Honorary Fellow within the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham and currently undertaking an Executive MBA. A chartered engineer and a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Kate is a professional Programme Manager with Fellowship of the Association of Project Management.

Professor Joan Condell

Professor Joan Condell is CEO of a spinout company ActionSense Ltd andpreviously CEO of spinout company HidInImage Ltd. She has numerous patentsfiled in UK and US; and has completed trials with key industrial players with securityand wearables technologies. She is a senior fellow of the Centre for HigherEducation Research and Practice at Ulster and a fellow of the Higher EducationAcademy. She was awarded a Distinguished Teaching and Learning Fellowship in 2011.

Dr Felicity De Cogan

Felicity got her first degree in Chemistry at the University of York, UK and then moved to the University of Manchester to carry out a PhD. Following this she moved to the University of Birmingham and was awarded Enterprise Fellowships from ARVO and the Royal Academy of Engineering before being tenured in 2017 as the Birmingham Fellow for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Felicity’s career focuses on translating technologies from bench to bedside and she founded her first company NitroPep Ltd in 2017 based on a novel antimicrobial technology, she commercialised her second technology on drug delivery in 2018 and is currently spinning out her third company based on novel ways to treat blindness.

Dr Antonia Sagona

Dr Antonia Sagona is an Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences, at the University of Warwick. Her expertise lies in microbiology, synthetic biology, cell biology and biotechnology and is a Member of Warwick Integrative Synthetic Biology Centre and Warwick Antimicrobial Interdisciplinary Centre. She received her PhD from the Medical School, University of Oslo Norway (2012) as a Marie-Curie fellow and upon completion she was awarded the prestigious EMBO long-term postdoctoral fellowship (2013-2015) with host institution the Warwick Medical School. She started a spinout company (initially Rapiphage Ltd and then Lucidix Biolabs Ltd) together with Dr Richard Amaee with funding from DSV Imperial and investors, focusing on phage-based diagnostics.

Agne Milukaite

Agne is a co-founder and CEO of Cycle.land which is based in Oxford. The global bike-sharing platform Cycle.land aims to revolutionize urban journeys. Prior to launching this venture, Agne worked for a Canadian home robotics company in Berkeley, California. She received her MSc in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford and she is actively involved in local advisory roles at OxLEP Innovation Group and IDEA Women focus group for founders/C-Suite to discuss entrepreneurship support for women. She is excited about creating a more fair, diverse and sustainable entrepreneurship vision and practice that empowers the next generation of entrepreneurs to pursue their dreams.

Liz Rowsell

Liz Rowsell is Corporate R&D Director at Johnson Matthey, a global leader in sustainable technologies. Liz works with a diverse team including chemists, engineers, biologists, physicists and data scientists to support

She received her PhD in 1993 from the University of Essex, in collaboration with the Nitrogen Fixation Unit at Sussex University, investigating charge interactions in Fe-S proteins and Fe co-ordination complexes using Mössbauer spectroscopy.

Liz joined Johnson Matthey as a Research Scientist developing metal-based therapeutics for the treatment of sepsis in 1993. During her career with Johnson Matthey Liz has worked on the development of catalysts for use in pharmaceuticals, food and personal safety, as well as programmes in biomass processing, gas purification and materials for energy production.

Sheana Yu

An award-winning design engineer who has a passion for delivering social impact through design. Sheana’s creations have been exhibited worldwide in places such as Dubai Design District, Tokyo Design week and Milan Design Museum. She is a double MSc graduate from the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, and has since established herself as a renowned conceptual designer, working on projects such as the Aura anti-pollution device and Tokyo’s Transportation system. Affected by scoliosis throughout her life, Sheana is driven to support wheelchair users to live more comfortably with Aergo. Her early prototypes gained support from the James Dyson Foundation, Royal Academy of Engineering and Royal Commission 1851 to develop Aergo from an idea to a commercially viable medical device. Sheana’s achievement with Aergo was then recognised by Innovate UK as one of the leading Women in Innovation.

Catherine Bottrill

Catherine Bottrill has almost 20 years’ experience working in environmental sustainability. She holds subject expertise in climate mitigation policy, business sustainability strategy development and environmental impact analysis. Catherine is co-founder and CEO of Pilio, a sustainability technology and consultancy company that spun-out from the University of Oxford in 2011. Pilio works with businesses to develop and implement their sustainability strategies including being on a net zero carbon pathway. We are currently developing tools and services to support businesses assess the carbon and nature impacts in their supply chains. She has provided sustainability expertise to clients in the creative, fashion, hotel, public and retail sectors. Catherine holds an MSc in Environmental Management from Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Management. In 2016, she was selected as one of the top 15 women in tech by Angel Academe, supported by the City of London. In 2019, Catherine was named on the Open Data Institute’s Women Entrepreneur Longlist.

Dr Ursula Gompels

Dr Ursula Gompels trained in Molecular Biology and Pathology at the University of Cambridge, became a Professor in Molecular Virology at the University of London followed by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship at GlaxoSmithKline and an MA in Management. Roles now are as Founder, CEO and CSO of Virokine Therapeutics Ltd with Virothera their unit focused on infectious disease. This Start-up Biotech has a diverse Board, Scientific Advisory and Seed investor base, and is supported by the NIH/NIAID in USA for preclinical studies. Its first development candidates, new types of DNA vaccine combined with therapeutic, showed in vivo POC. Its proprietary platform technologies use novel gene therapy inspired by viruses, aimed at new immunotherapeutics for everyone.