The Advocacy Committee represents the PraxisAuril membership and our organisation's values on matters affecting the knowledge exchange and technology transfer profession. We do this by responding to government and other sector consultations, by engaging with policy makers and influencers at a national and regional level, and by proactively voicing opinion through publications, events and online media. The Committee is one of the largest of PraxisAuril's practitioner committees as it is important for us to represent a broad mix of our membership organisations and their research commercialisation cultures.
The PraxisAuril office contact for the Advocacy Committee team is Tamsin Mann.
Alisdair Aldous is the Director for Knowledge Exchange at University of the Arts London, where he leads on the strategic direction, co-ordination and development of the university’s portfolio of knowledge exchange activities. Before taking up a career in higher education, Alisdair worked as a consultant in the areas of creative business support, public art commissioning, and creative economy-led regeneration.
Carole is Director of Knowledge Exchange & Innovation at the University of Kent where she leads the strategic growth of knowledge exchange and innovation. Carole has over 25 years’ experience of businesses and stakeholder engagement and has a broad portfolio. This covers, business development; collaborative partnerships; commercialisation of the University’s intellectual and knowledge expertise; consultancy; student knowledge exchange and supporting SMEs. The role also includes regional economic impact, place making and working closely with the Local Enterprise Partnership.
Carole is a Board member of several businesses and sits on numerous local and regional partnership boards including Honorary President of the Kent Invicta Chamber of Commerce, Past Chair of AURIL (Association for Research & Industry Links) and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Leadership Foundation.
Carole has a particular interest in supporting women in enterprise having recently launched a new Programme to support women in the workplace and is a Leadership Foundation Aurora Role Model.
Michael is past Chair of the PraxisAuril Conference Committee. He has worked in Technology Transfer since September 1999. Currently employed by Durham University, he previously worked for five years at RTC North (an independent TT company)Prior to RTC North, he worked for twelve years in various manufacturing and materials management roles, mainly at Rolls-Royce.
Recent work includes the creation of Applied Graphene Materials (AGM) PLC - originally Durham Graphene Science Ltd (DGS). Alongside the academic inventor, Michael served on the Board of Directors for three years, building the business from scratch, securing V.C. investments and winning multiple grants, awards and contracts. AGM floated on AIM in 2013 and now employs 34 staff.
Since co-founding FD Solutions with Malcolm Durham in the early 1990s Richard has developed from a flexible FD to various businesses, to overseeing the growth of the firm as the leading provider of flexible Director services. In particular he has developed and implemented innovative approaches to financing and management information systems.
Board member of the Bio Industry Association Finance and Taxation Committee. Guest lecturer and presenter for Biopioneer events and on entrepreneurship workshops for scientists and engineers around the globe.
He has developed and implemented innovative approaches to financing and management information systems. Chairman of widely-acclaimed The People’s Supermarket. Member of the advisory board of the London Chamber Orchestra. FD of Cellcentric, a dominant discovery platform in epigenetics.
Richard gained a BCom from Edinburgh University in 1981 and qualified as a CA at Ernst & Whinney in 1984. Prior to joining FD Solutions, Richard had finance director roles with Samuelson Communications and Laserpoint Communications. Specialist sectors include technology start-ups, food, retail, manufacturing and not-for-profit.
Richard’s achievements since the inception of FD Solutions include: helping an entrepreneur turnaround his manufacturing business from a loss-making operation to £35m turnover in four years. Establish a VC-backed invoice discounting operation with turnover of £100m and a back office of only 30, by designing and implementing a system based on Systems Union Sun. An NHS organisation to treble in size by negotiating an outsourcing contract with the Department of Health. A small specialist engineering manufacturer turnaround its business from loss making to profitable, completing a sale and buyback, followed a few years later by a further sale to a European manufacturer.
Timothy Brundle is Director of Research & Impact at Ulster University. Timothy directs Ulster’s research strategy, governance and administration, and guides its economic impact through knowledge exchange and intellectual property commercialisation. He also holds the position of Chief Executive of Innovation Ulster Ltd, Ulster’s venturing and investment company. As a Senior Leader at Ulster, Timothy directs a team of 90 research management professionals, an annual £15m research strategy budget and manages £1.5m of spend each week on research and innovation. Timothy has worked throughout his career in research-led organisations, with a focus on developing their customer-orientation, economic impact, business outcomes and shareholder value. He has led over £500m of research investment, established more than 40 high tech start up companies, secured over £450m of Venture Capital and ensured investor value from over £150m of company acquisitions and from a stock market floatation. He is an experienced and skilled member of the Board of both young companies and mature public Institutions, including serving as a Director of many of Ulster’s spin out companies, Invest NI, the UK Knowledge Transfer Network, and until 2022 served as Chair of Young Enterprise NI.
Alison is CEO of the Government Office for Technology Transfer (GOTT). She previously established and was Director, Knowledge Transfer Ireland (KTI). She started in the biotech industry and moved to the MRC where she was interim CEO at Medical Research Council Technology before becoming MD at King’s College London. Alison is Past Chair of AUTM and a founder and Past Chair of ATTP, which awards the global Registered Technology Transfer Professional (RTTP) credential. A very long time ago she helped establish Praxis and is super-proud of how it's flourished through its mergers (one of which she helped lead). Alison was awarded an OBE in 2010 (UK) in recognition of her contribution to Knowledge Transfer. In 2018 she received the Global University Venturing Lifetime Achievement Award.
Phil is the CEO of Queen Mary Innovation Ltd, the Technology Transfer Company of Queen Mary University of London
Phil worked previously at the Universities of Oxford, Bath and Bournemouth in a variety of roles related to Research Management and Commercialisation, and for the UK Research Office in Brussels focusing on European research funding.
He is a Council member for Research England, former director of and Ambassador for PraxisAuril, the UK professional association for Knowledge Exchange Practitioners, and has previously been on the board of ARMA, the Association of Research Managers and Administrators. He is a registered technology transfer professional (RTTP), a Member of the Institute of Directors (MIoD) and is also a director of Fluvial Innovations Ltd. He has an MBA from Oxford and an MA in Intellectual Property Management from Bournemouth University. He used to be a chemist.
Jeff Skinner has been in technology transfer for over 30 years, first in industry then for many years as Commercial Director of UCL where he built and ran most of the KT units (ventures, licensing, consultancy, seed fund, business development, alliances…) at the College. In 2007 he left this behind to join London Business School as the first Executive Director of the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital where he works with generations of MBA students, persuading them to create ventures of their own (currently about 30 a year).
He is past President of PraxisAURIL and ASTP (the European KT association) and Emeritus Member of AUTM. He designed and ran many of the Associations’ KT training courses. He was on the founding team of ATTP and Chaired its Professional Development Panel for a decade. He continues to train hundreds of KT professions each year – and several hundred more early career researchers across Europe.
Now officially retired though as busy as ever.
Knowledge Exchange Profile: For the past 15 years Sarah has worked to promote knowledge exchange between HE and industry, her work has been focused on Cumbria and as such her specialist area of understanding is the growth and development of new Universities as place based anchor institutions in rural areas. All of her industry and knowledge exchange work has involved engagement with businesses across a range of sectors, with a specific understanding of the challenges of enabling knowledge exchange in rural areas with a primarily SME business profile. European Funding has enabled much the Knowledge Exchange work, as such Sarah has experience of managing and delivering programmes of over £24M of European structural funds.
Over the past 15 years Sarah has worked with and managed teams of up to 26 Knowledge Exchange professionals and as such has a keen interest in the advancement of knowledge exchange professional development frameworks.
Sarah’s most recent role has been as Business Development and Enterprise Lead for the University of Cumbria. She has sat on many regional boards encouraging links between Universities and regional growth this includes: Cumbria LEP Technical Officers Group, the Cumbria ESIF committee and the North West Universities European Unit. Sarah was very proud to be an AURIL council member from 2015.
Liam leads Research and Innovation Services at the University of Bradford, holding responsibility for ‘end-to-end’ support services for research and innovation projects, and for nurturing a research environment of excellence and inclusion at England’s top-ranked University for social mobility. Liam is co-author of Bradford’s strategies for both Research and Innovation and Business and Community Engagement. He is the chair of Yorkshire Universities’ Regional Development Group, a strategy forum comprising counterparts from the 12 Higher Education Institutions headquartered in Yorkshire and Humber. RDG aims to make the diversity of our sector count in the economic, social and cultural development of our region.
Liam studied Chemistry at Oxford and Nottingham, before postdoctoral research at Sheffield, Erlangen-Nuremburg (as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow) and Leeds working on organic materials and self-assembly chemistry. He joined chemical multinational Clariant as an R&D Chemist in 2004, then returned to Sheffield in 2006 to take up a business development role at the Polymer Centre. Polymer Centre Manager from 2008, he developed the Science Faculty’s Knowledge Exchange Strategy and the Sheffield Science Gateway during 2011/12. He joined the University of Bradford as Head of Knowledge Transfer in 2013 and became Associate Director in 2018.
Kathryn joined UCL in November 2018. Her role includes development of UCL’s knowledge exchange activities, development of associated policies, allocation of funding for knowledge exchange activities, and leadership of institutional response to the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF). Prior to joining UCL, Kathryn was Director of the Enterprise Office at Loughborough University, with broad responsibility for knowledge exchange, business development and commercialisation activities. Kathryn started her career in industrial research laboratories, working for BP and Sharp. She holds a degree and PhD in Physics from King’s College, London.