James Phillips works at the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) on the Blair-Hague reports on Science and Technology. He was formerly special adviser to the Prime Minister for science and technology in Downing Street, where he worked on creating the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) and the UK rapid testing program. James completed his PhD in Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, winning the British Neuroscience Association graduate thesis of the year award.

David has a background in engineering, mathematics, physics, and biochemistry. He has studied the accessibility of folded RNAs, described the non-genetic individuality and inheritance of swimming behaviors in microbes, developed principled methods for quantifying behaviour in nematodes as well as the canalisation and plasticity of their development, investigated the physics of molecular recognition and complex formation, and helped to build a simulator of gene expression dynamics. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, worked with Stanislas Leibler at the Rockefeller University and the IAS, and worked with Eric Miska at the University of Cambridge. Recently, he has founded of the Living Physics Lab,set in his own small vessel to head out for areas of the scientific unknown where the fleets of academia and industry may be ill-suited to explore.

Jason Chin is a Programme Leader at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (MRC-LMB), where he is also a Head of the Centre for Chemical & Synthetic Biology and joint Head of the Division of Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry. He is a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at the University of Cambridge Department of Chemistry, a founding Associate Faculty Member in Synthetic Genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and a fellow and director of studies in Biochemistry at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is founder and CSO of Constructive Biology Ltd, and a non-Executive Director at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology of the UK government – where he serves on the Main Board, the DSIT/UKRI Metascience Board, and the Engineering Biology Steering Group.
He was awarded the Francis Crick Prize by the Royal Society in 2009 and the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Corday Morgan Prize and the European Molecular Biology Organization’s (EMBO) Gold Medal, in 2010. He is the inaugural recipient (2011) of the Louis-Jeantet Young Investigator Career Award and in 2019 he was awarded the Sackler International Prize in the Physical Sciences.
Jason is in the European Patent Office Inventor Hall of Fame, a member of EMBO, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a Fellow of The Royal Society.

Tiago Costa obtained his Biochemistry degree in Portugal, and after a short spell in the industry he started his PhD in 2007 at the University of Umeå, Sweden, where he studied the function of a crucial protein involved in Yersinia infection. In 2013, he joined the laboratory of Prof Gabriel Waksman at the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology, Birkbeck and UCL to elucidate the structure of a nanomachine essential for DNA transfer during bacterial conjugation. In 2017, he joined Imperial College London and the MRC Centre for Molecular Bacteriology and Infection as a Lecturer in Bacterial Pathogenesis and was promoted to Senior lecturer in 2023. His lab is dedicated to understanding how bacteria transport substrates across their envelope en route to target cells. Their ultimate goal is to develop novel therapeutic strategies to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and infectious diseases. 

Dinithi Sumanaweera is a Schmidt Accelerate Programme Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory and Cambridge Stem Cell Institute (Teichmann Lab), and a collaborator at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. As a computational postdoc, she is studying and developing machine learning models for trajectory analysis and comparison in single-cell genomics. Dinithi is a Computer Science and Engineering graduate from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, and obtained her PhD in computational biology from Monash University Australia, for protein alignment modelling.

My background is in mathematics and computer science, but I have always worked in and around biology laboratories since I started university. Originally from the United States, I completed a BA in mathematics at Rutgers University. I then moved to the United Kingdom to complete my PhD in physics at the University of Oxford as a Marie Curie Fellow where I was supervised by Andrew Turberfield (Oxford Physics) and Luca Cardelli (Microsoft Research). I stayed at the University of Oxford to do a postdoc at the Dunn School of Pathology and was also based at St. Cross College where I held the Emanoel Lee Junior Research Fellowship in Medical Sciences. In 2019, I moved to the University of Cambridge where I am now the Assistant Professor of AI and Disease with dual affiliation to the Department of Pathology and Department of Genetics.

Lucy Colwell is a University Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge and Research Scientist at Google. Her research combines theory and computation to elicit structural information about relationships between variables from data. One example is how all the information necessary to specify both the 3D structure and the function of a protein is encoded in its sequence, and how we can exploit the large numbers of protein sequences now available to crack this code. Colwell obtained her PhD in Applied Maths from Harvard and completed postdoc training at Harvard and Princeton.

Andreas Bender develops new life science data analysis methods (AI/ML/data science) and their application in drug discovery, chemical biology, and in silico drug safety. He is the Professor for Life Science Informatics at the Centre for Molecular Science Informatics of the University of Cambridge. In addition, he is the Chief Technology & Informatics Officer of PangeAI, part of Pangea Botanica, co-founder of Healx Ltd., for data-driven drug repurposing for rare diseases, and co-founder of PharmEnable Ltd., for accessing new chemistry for difficult targets.

Gregory Winter 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. Now officially retired, he was previously a Head of Division of Protein and Nucleic Acid Chemistry at the LMB and Master of Trinity College. His invention of a method for humanising mouse antibodies led to many important therapeutic antibodies, including Keytuda, currently the world’s No 1 selling pharmaceutical drug. His inventions of methods for making human antibodies from libraries of antibody genes led to Humira, until recently the world’s No 1 selling pharmaceutical drug, and also to a share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018.
His inventions also provided the cornerstone IP for three companies that he founded: Cambridge Antibody Technology in 1989 (bought by AstraZeneca), Domantis in 2000 (bought by GSK) and Bicycle Therapeutics in 2009.

Jason is a scientist and entrepreneur, passionate about translating innovative technologies into better patient outcomes. As CEO and Co-Founder of Start Codon, a UK-based accelerator, he aims to discover the most disruptive life science, BioTech and healthcare founders and help them translate their innovations into successful ventures. This is achieved through a combination of seed funding and a bespoke venture-building programme, which taps into the exceptional resources of the Cambridge cluster as well as the global network and knowledge of Jason and the Start Codon team.
Previously, he was CEO of Cambridge Epigenetix (now Biomodal) and Business Development Manager for Horizon Discovery’s diagnostics division. He also served as an associate for Cambridge Enterprise, the technology transfer office of the University of Cambridge. Originally from Louisiana, Jason was awarded a Marshall Scholarship to complete his PhD in Medicine at the University of Cambridge (Clare College) after graduating Summa Cum Laude from Tulane University with a BSc in Molecular Biology and Chemistry. He is also a visiting Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge, and lives in Cambridge with his husband and sons.

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.

Steve Smith is Managing Partner at leading intellectual property firm, Potter Clarkson, which has offices throughout the UK and Nordics.  With a reputation for excellence within the life sciences sector, Steve and his colleagues advise clients of all sizes, from academic inventors to ‘Big Pharma’, providing commercially-focussed expertise in patents, trade marks, designs, litigation, licensing and consultancy. Steve studied biochemistry at the University of Oxford and subsequently completed a DPhil in neuroscience at the same university (including a placement at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm).  He joined Potter Clarkson as a trainee patent attorney in 1998 and became a partner in 2006.  Specialising in protecting biotechnology inventions, his experience encompasses a broad range of clients including multinational companies, early-stage and established biotech companies based throughout Europe, as well as government-funded research institutes and universities. Clients value his broad scientific knowledge, keen advocacy skills and pragmatic commercial advice.  He has extensive experience of patent prosecution at the European Patent Office, including oppositions and appeals, and has also supported national patent litigation in the UK and Nordics. Recognised as a respected expert commentator, Steve has written articles and given numerous presentations on the patenting of biotechnological inventions. As Managing Partner since 2019, Steve has provided the strategic leadership that has seen Potter Clarkson grow substantially and establish itself as one of the leading IP firms.