Academia & Entrepreneurship: in conversation with E-Lab CRAs and Gerard Grech OBE
Are you interested in entrepreneurship or are you curious about the startup space? Do you want to know how students/PhDs/postdocs have taken the leap and transitioned from academia to building their startups? If so, join us for a casual fireside chat with Gerard Grech (former chief executive of Tech Nation) in conversation with our three amazing E-Lab Research Associates (Coco, Nadia, and Ismail).
We have also just launched applications for our E-Lab Research Associate scheme 2024/25, and will be making up to three appointments in any subject (arts, humanities, sciences, engineering), to start in 1 January 2025. So come along to know more about the E-lab and how its community can help you to transition from an academic to an inspiring entrepreneur!
Speaker Profiles:
Gerard Grech
Gerard Grech is the Managing Director of Founders at the University of Cambridge, a new strategic initiative focused on accelerating the formation and scaling of new technology companies. He is the former founding Chief Executive of Tech Nation, a pioneering UK Government-backed initiative that shaped Europe’s most productive digital ecosystem. Tech Nation fuelled a 5x increase in the number of UK cities with a tech unicorn or more and secured the UK’s digital leadership position in Europe. Tech Nation was the 9th fastest growing technology company in the UK public sector in 2022 before being acquired by the Founders Forum Group. Gerard is also a member of the UK Government’s Digital Economy Council and the World Economic Forum’s Digital Board. Previously, he worked at the intersection of mobile, digital media and venture capital in New York, London and Paris in senior leadership roles at Orange, France Telecom, Nokia and Nokia Growth Partners, among others. He started his career in the music business.
Ismail Sami
Ismail Sami is a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellow, Entrepreneurial Fellow at the Faraday Institution, and materials scientist based in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. Ismail is also the CEO and co-founder of Molyon; delivering the next generation energy storage solution to help us get towards net-zero.
Ismail completed my MPhys in Theoretical Physics at the University of Manchester, with a year abroad at the University of California, Berkeley. After graduating with a MRes in Engineering at the University of Cambridge, he continued to gain a PhD in developing novel materials for energy storage.
Coco Newton
Coco Newton is a 2023 Schmidt Science Fellow based between University of Cambridge, University College London and Delft Technical University in the Netherlands. Her work focuses on advocacy for transformative change in dementia healthcare systems, combining neuroscience with health systems design and engineering to translate new technologies for earlier disease detection and dementia prevention.
Nadia Mohd-Radzman
Nadia Mohd-Radzman is passionate about improving food security by translating plant biotechnology research to the field. Nadia has co-founded an early-stage biotechnology startup that is developing a new technology to open up the bottleneck of plant gene-editing for better and improved crops. This was covered as one of the case studies by IE Cambridge on their website. Apart from my entrepreneurial and research work, Nadia is also an active steering committee member of Cambridge Global Food Security (GFS) that is involved in developing programmes and events as platforms for interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborations between different departments across University of Cambridge to solve food security issues.
WHEN: Thursday 15 October 2024
5.00 – 5.30pm: Drinks reception and networking
5.30 – 6.30pm: Fireside chats with the inaugural CRAs of King’s E-lab
6.30 – 7.00pm: Q&A
WHERE: Judge Business School, Lecture Theatre 1
TICKETS: Get your free ticket here