Workshops

Dr. Catherine Prescott

Catherine has over 20 years’ experience spanning research, management, and business in the life sciences and venture capital sectors. She trained as a scientist and has worked in academia, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, and as a venture capitalist. As Founder Director of Biolatris Ltd in Cambridge, she provides consultancy to clients in the stem cell and regenerative medicine sectors, supporting innovation from technical due diligence to market analysis and business development. Catherine has served as chair of the UK National Stem Cell Network Advisory committee and Director of the East of England Stem Cell Network, and is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London. She is widely recognized for her leadership in translating scientific discoveries into commercial ventures and for her advisory roles across academia and industry.

Dr. Will McEwan

Will has built his career at the intersection of immunology and neurodegeneration, and is currently a Group Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cambridge. He trained as a viral immunologist and co-discovered the antibody receptor TRIM21 during his postdoctoral work at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. His research focuses on harnessing the cell’s intrinsic immune pathways to clear protein aggregates such as tau, which are implicated in neurodegenerative diseases. Most recently, Will co-founded TRIMTECH Therapeutics, a Cambridge-based biotech developing targeted protein degradation therapies for neurodegenerative and inflammatory disorders. In March 2025, TRIMTECH raised $31 million in seed funding to advance its pipeline of aggregate-selective degrader molecules, based on the TRIM21 mechanism, toward clinical applications. Will’s work bridges fundamental science and translational medicine, with a focus on developing new therapeutic strategies for conditions with limited treatment options.

Dr. Chris Tate FRS

Chris has worked throughout his career on integral membrane proteins, including red blood cell antigens, transporters and GPCRs, and he is now a Programme Leader at the LMB in Cambridge. His group has determined many different GPCR structures by both X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM to study ligand specificity, efficacy and coupling to G proteins and b -arrestin. Most recently his lab published the first structure of a fungal receptor, an obligate dimer that couples to two G proteins simultaneously, and showed its unique activation mechanism compared to other GPCR classes. His group has also developed new tools and methods to facilitate the structure determination of GPCRs, such as mini-G proteins and conformational thermostabilisation. In 2007, Chris was a co-founder of the GPCR drug discovery company Heptares Therapeutics (now Nxera Pharma UK Ltd), based on his work on conformational thermostabilisation, which employs ~170 scientists based at Granta Park, Cambridge, and has many potential new drugs in clinical trials. He was elected a member of EMBO in 2020 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2021.