The Oxford Nanopore executive team has combined experience in the development, manufacture and commercialisation of disruptive technologies including DNA sequencing. This includes a corporate function to support the Company's past and future fundraising activities.
Dr Gordon Sanghera
Chief Executive Officer
Gordon Sanghera was co-founder of Oxford Nanopore, together with Hagan Bayley and IP Group. He was appointed CEO in June 2005. He brings over 20 years' experience in the design, development and global launch of disruptive platform sensor technologies.
Dr Sanghera’s PhD in bioelectronics sensing was followed by a career at MediSense an Oxford spin-out that delivered a new generation glucose technology to the market. Following the acquisition of MediSense by Abbott Laboratories Dr Sanghera held both UK and US VP and Director-level positions, including VP World Wide Marketing, Research Director and Manufacturing Process Development Director. Before its acquisition by Abbott, Gordon led the R&D of Medisense Inc. where he was instrumental in the launch of several generations of blood glucose bio-electronic systems for the consumer and hospital medical markets. He has also developed and validated production processes to meet with the regulatory requirements for USA and Europe.
Gordon has a PhD in bio-electronic technology and a degree in Chemistry.
Read the article about Dr Sanghera in the Financial Times.
Dr Spike Willcocks
Chief BD Officer
After completing an MA in Chemistry and a DPhil in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, Dr Willcocks became one of the initial members of IPGroup Plc following its landmark deal with the Chemistry Department at Oxford. Ultimately leading the Life Science team, Dr Willcocks' role encompassed all aspects of technology commercialisation, including spin-out company formation and business and corporate development, as well as private and public equity financings.
Dr Willcocks was a key player in the creation of 14 life science businesses based on technology from three universities, leading proposals for the investment of £4m in seed financing from IPGroup and holding positions of Director and Chairman for 6 portfolio companies. Working alongside the executive teams of the portfolio companies, Dr Willcocks played an integral role in out-licensing transactions, co-development deals and acquisitions. As well as supporting fundraisings for portfolio biotechnology companies, raising an aggregate of £20m, Dr Willcocks also assisted with IPGroup's own IPO in October 2003 on the LSE, raising £30m and capitalising the company at over £100m. Dr Willcocks was actively involved in the establishment of ONL whilst at IPGroup before joining full time in January 2006.
He is also a leading real tennis player, and regularly competes in international tournaments.
Clive Brown
Chief Technology Officer
Clive Brown is CTO of Oxford Nanopore, where he leads the innovation of breakthrough technologies and product development, that are designed to enable the analysis of anything, by anyone, anywhere.
Clive has held a variety of roles in Genomics and Genetic R&D, he also played a key role in developing the Solexa NGS platform that is now the basis for Illumina’s sequencing technology.
Dr John Milton
Chief Scientific Officer
John is Chief Scientific Officer at Oxford Nanopore. He joined the company in 2008 and has been instrumental in our growth from a start-up company spun out from Oxford University to a global presence in the DNA sequencing technology market.
A member of the executive team, John initially built and recruited our chemical and biological research departments, putting in place a research pipeline capable of rapidly designing and producing high quality nanopore proteins, enzymes, chemicals and other materials essential for our technology R&D programmes.
John joined us from Solexa (2001-2006), where, as Senior Director of R&D, he designed and built the Reversible Terminator chemistry that lies at the heart of Illumina's sequencing systems.
At Solexa, as at Oxford Nanopore, John built up and managed large multidisciplinary scientific teams across a range of technical disciplines. His work in this field led to the scale-up and production of the chemical sequencing reagents for commercial launch of the Solexa sequencing system which was sold to Illumina in 2007 for $650million.
More recently, John has initiated new R&D efforts looking at future technologies that will complement our nanopore sequencing technology.
John holds a PhD in Chemistry (1991, University of Liverpool) and, following two years of postdoctoral work at Leeds University, spent a decade working in R& D in the pharmaceutical sector.
In 2018 John was awarded the Potts Science Medal for outstanding lifetime contribution to Chemistry.
John Schoellerman
SVP, Corporate Development and Investment
John joined Oxford Nanopore in 2019 as SVP of Corporate Development and Investment
Together with the executive leadership team, John works on a range of fundraising and partnering activities aimed at scaling the business and tapping new growth opportunities for Oxford Nanopore’s technology.
Previously a Managing Director and head of the Medtech practice at Lazard, John led a broad range of strategic transactions for clients in the US, Europe and Asia. He has also worked in healthcare investment banking at J.P. Morgan in San Francisco, London and New York. John started his career at Hambrecht & Quist in San Francisco.
John holds a BA from Harvard and an MBA from INSEAD.
Tim Cowper
CFO
A Chartered Accountant and operations specialist, Tim was interim Finance Director at Oxford Nanopore for several months in 2009, handing over a stable and well documented finance infrastructure. He then joined Oxford Nanopore as Commercial Operations Director in 2012.
In his first five years at the company Tim was responsible for setting up and managing operations and infrastructure across the company, including leading on operations for our first product launch – the MinION Access Programme – in 2015.
As part of his Operations role, Tim selected and implemented our Enterprise Resource Planning system which has remained robust and fit for purpose throughout the company's rapid growth and development.
Tim was appointed as VP-Finance in 2017 and continues to ensure that Oxford Nanopore’s values of agility and entrepreneurialism are reflected in our corporate governance, risk control and business processes, to maximise business efficiency.
Having qualified as an accountant at Ernst & Young, Tim became Financial Controller of Celltech Group plc where he was a key member of the IPO team and managed several transactions of the Listed company. He went on to co-found Sterilox and ran the finance function before joining Clipper Ventures plc as Finance Director. Tim has also been Finance Director at British Biotech plc (Vernalis plc) as well as managing a portfolio of biotech and technology companies, including the AIM-listed Bioventix plc, before joining Oxford Nanopore.
Zoe McDougall
VP, Marketing and Corporate Affairs
Zoe joined Oxford Nanopore in 2008 in a strategic marketing, communications and investor facing role - the first person to be hired with a specific commercial remit. She now leads our Commercial & Corporate Marketing and Corporate Affairs functions.
Since the foundation of the company she has driven accessible and authentic communities and communication channels so anyone engaging with, or interested in, Oxford Nanopore understands the company, our technology and our philosophy, whatever the length or nature of their relationship with us. This supports sales and utilisation of the technology, as well as fundraising and investor relations. The Company has raised £613 million to date.
During early commercialisation, Zoe and her team drove the creation of structures and activities that support the building up of Oxford Nanopore’s customer community; this enables many teams at Oxford Nanopore to collaborate with our thriving user base, to improve the technology and expand the applications that it can perform.
Zoe started her career in sales and marketing at SmithKline Beecham. She subsequently worked at the strategic marketing and communications consultancy Porter Novelli where she ran healthcare-related campaigns across a range of clinical areas for clients including GSK, BMS and Pfizer, across multiple areas including immunology, cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory medicine.
Before joining Oxford Nanopore Zoe worked on the IPO and investor relations for a UK specialty pharma company. In 2004 she spent six months working with a medical humanitarian organisation in Sri Lanka.
Jordan Herman
VP, General Counsel
Jordan Herman joined Oxford Nanopore in 2021 as General Counsel. Prior to this Jordan was a partner at Baker Botts L.L.P., where he was our outside counsel for over a decade. He’s long been involved in supporting our growth from a dozen people to a global company; from an idea to an industry leading technology.
Jordan leads our growing in-house legal team, and his responsibilities reflect our growth journey both corporately and commercially. His main remit is to ensure his team have the desire and ability to enable the company to grow, flourish and innovate while remaining legal, ethical and reflecting our values.
Jordon’s role includes supporting and collaborating with leadership team, overseeing the legal department, negotiating legal transactions and identifying and managing risk. He and his team are also working on strengthening internal controls, simplifying our terms and conditions and establishing processes for global monitoring and compliance.
Jordan has many years’ experience in areas including technology transfer and commercial agreements, M&A, joint ventures, licensing, and venture capital. He has worked across the life science, software, medical device and digital media industries, supporting high growth businesses in the US, Europe and around the world.
Jordan was most recently Baker Botts L.L.P., Chair of the Austin Office Corporate Department and Co-Chair of the Life Sciences group. He JD from The Ohio State University, following which he clerked for the Hon. James Rosenbaum, formerly, Chief Judge for the U.S. District Court, District of Minnesota. Jordan also has a degree in Political Economy from Washington University.
Departmental leadership
Rosemary Sinclair Dokos
VP, Product & Programme Management
Rosemary Sinclair Dokos, VP of product and programme management, joined Oxford Nanopore in January 2014. Her initial role included the implementation of product management, release and distribution framework around the MinION Access Programme.
Rosemary is responsible for the management and release of all Oxford Nanopore devices, chemistry and software products. Part of this role is to ensure that teams across R&D, production, commercial and operations work together to accelerate innovation from our research teams into the hands of the customer and scale our offering to our growing user base.
Rosemary has over 15 years’ experience in the life science industry. Prior to joining Oxford Nanopore, she led the Market Development and Life Science division of VWR UK where she was responsible for teams in technical sales, field marketing and contracts. In this role she worked with customers across all scientific industry sectors and managed a portfolio of over 600,000 products. Rosemary holds a BSc in Marine Sciences from the University of Southampton and is currently undertaking an executive MBA at Warwick Business School.
Rosemary and her team maintain a close connection with our user community, ensuring their experiences of using Oxford Nanopore devices inform our product development cycle.
Dan Turner
VP, Applications
Dan leads the Applications Team at Oxford Nanopore Technologies. He is a highly experienced genomics scientist with expertise in all aspects of ‘next-generation’ sequencing. He provides scientific and strategic leadership for multi-disciplinary teams in Oxford, New York and San Francisco. The Applications group aims to bring together sample prep technologies, genomics applications and bioinformatics, to expand the utility of Oxford Nanopore Technologies’ devices and help bring the benefits of these technologies to the wider world.
Roger Pettett
VP, Informatics
Roger is responsible for all Informatics and IT provision at Oxford Nanopore. He started at Oxford Nanopore in the mists of time with a background in scalable web systems and NGS data management from 10 years spent at the Hinxton Genome Campus. Roger has at least one line of code in nearly every piece of software ever produced at Nanopore. Roger literally and figuratively wears hats of many different colours but routinely spends most of his waking hours converting coffee into code. Likes good software engineering practices, reading and walks in the park. Roger is easily distracted by shiny things and would rather be making stuff with buzzword compliant technology (and lasers).
Dr James Clarke
VP, Platform Technology
Dr James Clarke is responsible for the Research Division at Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd working with Clive Brown to push the boundaries of nanopore technology. Over the last ten years, his work has included: pioneering strand sequencing chemistry at Oxford Nanopore, scaling up the membrane chemistry for the MinION platform, and managing the companies' nanopore consortium of world class academics.
Stuart Reid
VP, Development
Stuart Reid is VP of Development at Oxford Nanopore. Stuart is responsible for the specification, performance and delivery of the company?s nanopore-based sensing products and applications into the marketplace. He joined Oxford Nanopore in 2006, with a particular interest in biophysical systems and signals analysis, following a DPhil in Physics (Bionanotechnology) from Oxford University as part of the Life Sciences Interface Doctoral Training Centre. He has been instrumental at all stages of the product development cycle, from the fundamental science and invention, through specification, implementation and optimisation to delivery into the hands of our user community.
Ant Jones
VP, Engineering
Ant Jones is VP of Engineering at Oxford Nanopore, responsible for bringing all of Nanopore?s products from concept to production; this covers Industrial design, mechanical design, electronic design, production process and equipment development and validation. Ant has 20+ years? experience mainly with-in the medical device industry taking ideas from concept to regulatory approved commercial products. Ant joined Oxford Nanopore from Lombard Medical where he was head of design developing an AAA endovascular stent graft system which has class III medical device approval worldwide. Previous to this he has designed within: IVD, Orthopeadics, automotive and Plastics industries.
Andy Davies
VP, Global IT, Business Systems & Digital Services
Andy is VP of Global IT, Digital & Business systems and is responsible for Information technology and infrastructure across the business, including privacy and information security. His remit also includes our online presence including the corporate website, the Nanopore Community and Store as well as other digital channels. Andy has been with Oxford Nanopore for six years, having previously held senior positions in banking, telecommunication and professional services. He is also the organisation’s data protection officer.
Lakmal Jayasinghe
VP Nanopore Research
Dr. Lakmal Jayasinghe leads the biological nanopore research team at Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Lakmal joined Oxford Nanopore in 2006 after finishing his PhD in chemical biology in the University of Oxford. During his PhD in the Hagan Bayley group, Lakmal has studied different nanopores and has gained a wealth of knowledge in engineering nanopores using genetic and chemical approaches. His responsibilities at ONT include improving the readout signal of the ONT platform by upgrading its current nanopore reader and discovering and engineering new nanopores to suit various ONT applications and platforms. Lakmal also works with many academic nanopore collaborators across the world to make sure Oxford Nanopore uses the best possible nanopore reader in its platforms.
Louisa Ludbrook
Senior Director, Sales & Market Development
Louisa joined Oxford Nanopore in 2016 and is our Senior Director of Global Sales.
Louisa is a team builder who has established and grown our sales function to a global team today. She has created a sales process and a sales culture to deliver on the vision of disrupting the traditional life sciences genomics market. She’s also established a senior sales leadership group, who between them manage our regional sales teams, sales development, new market development functions and sales channel partnerships.
Louisa is now responsible for leading global sales and market development teams for the company, and ensuring our technology gets out to people in all corners of the globe. She is highly motivated by the examples of impact in the field and the challenges of making cutting edge technology accessible to a global user group.
Prior to joining Oxford Nanopore, Louisa held senior sales positions of Sales at Horizon Discovery, Roche Diagnostics Australia and Source BioScience in sales roles.
Louisa is currently undertaking an Executive MBA at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. She holds a PhD in Molecular Biology, an honours bachelor degree in biomedical science and a Graduate Certificate in Commercialisation of Research, from Monash University.
Nirmala Santiapillai
VP, Global Services
Nirmala joined Oxford Nanopore in 2020 to develop the global services team. Her remit includes leading our customer service, technical and commercial operations functions.
Nirmala initially focused on establishing regionalised customer service to serve local customers in their local time zones and languages. To this end, she onboarded three new leaders who, in turn, have been growing their teams so all are replete with the right talent, capabilities, performance metrics and training.
Nirmala works in partnership with others in senior management to ensure customer service is optimised from the root. She has also created successful business process outsourcing for some straightforward deliverables so her Oxford Nanopore teams can focus on more challenging customer issues.
Nirmala is now focused on continuing to collaborate to deliver positive customer experience, technical support for customers to drive optimal utilisation and scaling commercial operations through increased automation.
Nirmala has worked in the healthcare field since 1989 and has programme leadership and business improvement experience gained from corporate and start-up environments. Prior to joining Oxford Nanopore she worked for General Electric where she held marketing, commercial and customer experience roles within the healthcare business.
Nirmala has a PhD in Neurochemistry from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College London.
Sarah Lapworth
VP, Global Human Resources
Sarah is the VP of Global Human Resources at ONT. She started consulting for ONT in 2011 before joining full time in 2013 as our first HR hire. Her initial remit was to support the executive team on critical long-term leadership recruitment, culture creation and infrastructure development around policy, process, and communication.
From day one, Sarah’s objective has been to recruit, retain and develop the best person for each role, wherever they are in the world. To this end, Sarah was instrumental in collaborating with our executive team to develop a culture imbued with our core values. Since then, we have embedded collaboration, fostered flexible working, and continue to prioritise physical and mental health, wellbeing, healthy communication and respect, all within a reward ethos.
ONT teams around the world represent a diverse and inclusive variety of people, all empowered to be responsible for their own time and delivery thanks to technology, a coaching framework, training, and accessible resources.
Alongside continually embedding our culture, talent acquisition and development, Sarah and her team have developed policies and processes which have supported ONT’s strategic transition. Once an early-stage R and D start up, ONT is now a global commercial business with the vision and technology to impact everyone and everything.
Since she completed her Business Apprenticeship in 1996, Sarah’s had national and global roles in the automotive, medical device and biotech industries, including playing an instrumental role in designing and implementing ADC’s transformation programme.
Sarah is a Chartered Member of the CIPD and holds a BA Honours Degree in Business Studies and Human Resource Management and a Post Graduate Diploma in Human Resource Management.
Richard Compton
VP, Commercial Operations
Richard joined Oxford Nanopore in 2016 to help build our commercial team from scratch. He is now responsible for the leadership of commercial operations units including global IT, business systems, digital services, global commercial operations, technical and customer services.
His remit includes key Customer Relationship Management including leading support of the Abu Dhabi Genome Programme; the world-leading population-scale initiative to develop personalised care and personalised medicine for the region.
Richard also ensures our commercial systems, processes and teams are ready to scale and support our continued growth – drawing on experience from leading Illumina’s EMEA Region, as Vice President and General Manager, prior to joining Oxford Nanopore.
At Illumina, Richard led a team of over 300 people and grew revenues by over $300m across a three-year timeframe. He also led the support of multiple population-scale sequencing programmes including Genomics England and deCODE genetics.
Richard also brings 12 years of experience as VP and General Manager (EMEA) of Dassault Systèmes Biovia. In this role he helped commercial and research customers successfully integrate and deploy enterprise scale software solutions in research and quality/regulated environments.
Richard holds a degree in Biochemistry with Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Birmingham.
Emma Stanton
VP, Clinical
Emma joins at a time when the potential clinical applications of nanopore sequencing are rapidly expanding. Her experience in medical and clinical affairs will support our ambitions for growth in healthcare applications over the coming years. Emma will work closely with the clinical market development team to accelerate the introduction and scale up of a range of clinical applications. In addition, Emma will work closely with DHSC and NHS colleagues with the goal of leveraging our LamPORE diagnostic platform for COVID 19 to add new clinical assays.
Until November this year, Emma was Director of Testing Supplies and Innovation at NHS Test and Trace. Prior to this, Emma was CEO of a health care company focussed on improving efficiency across elective care pathways in the NHS. Emma brings international healthcare experience from the US where she worked for a large payer based in Massachusetts and was previously a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Healthcare Policy and Practice at Harvard University.
Martyn Andrews
Head of IP
Martyn is a highly experienced patent attorney having worked mostly for US startup companies in medical diagnostic field. He is Head of IP at ONT. Martyn’s technical background is in academic Chemistry/Electrochemistry BSc/Msc, and he has additional R&D Bioelectrochemistry experience
Phil Watkins
Finance Director
Phil joined Oxford Nanopore in 2020 having consulted for the Company since 2018.
He now heads our finance function, overseeing the department and our financial and management reporting.
Throughout the Company’s fundraising in 2019 and 2020, Phil led the due diligence process liaising with potential investors and managing their advisors. Since joining full time, Phil led a major restructuring of the finance team, boosting both the size of the team and the experience within it. He will continue to oversee the preparation of accurate and timely financial information so senior leadership can make management decisions based on reliable data.
Phil has significant corporate finance experience across acquisitions, disposals and joint ventures, as well as broad commercial experience working with both the private and public sectors. Prior to joining Oxford Nanopore, he was both Managing and Finance Director of GEO Group Inc’s UK subsidiary, successfully winning a number of high profile outsourcing contracts. He has also held a number of senior group finance roles at Jarvis plc, including M&A Director, and spent three years as Finance Director for a number of start-up environmental tech companies.
Phil started his career at Ernst & Young and has a BSc in Agriculture from the University of Reading.
Rhodri Davies
Senior Director, Production
Rhodri joined Oxford Nanopore in 2011 as Director of Chip Production. Since 2016 he has led the Production group with responsibility for managing our technology transfer, manufacturing and quality functions and ensuring they evolve in line with our strategy.
He also offers support across our research, development and supply chain groups, contributing to solutions and providing subject matter expertise.
Looking forward, Rhodri’s goals will be to continue to collaborate and communicate with colleagues, further streamline business processes, and ensure our world-leading science is commercialised and delivered with a customer-first focus. This sentence needs a rewrite, it doesn’t really mean much, might go back to Rhod with it? Tempted to delete
Rhodri has been working in microengineering since 1999 and has delivered solutions to a broad range of customers across military and commercial markets. He has three patents and over 12 publications.
He has held leadership roles in material science research, product and process development, technology transfer, manufacturing and performance management. Before joining Oxford Nanopore he was Process Manager within the Sensors & Electronics Group at QinetiQ.
Rhodri has a BSc in Physics from the University of Wales.
Jeremy Bryar
Plant Director
Jerry joined Oxford Nanopore in 2014 as our Director of Continuous Improvement. His initial deliverables were to set up our first manufacturing operation and develop a blueprint for scaling it.
Jerry is now Plant Director, and has driven the design, build and fit out of our new world class manufacturing, warehousing and logistics site, the MinION Building, in record time.
Jerry is now responsible for all aspects of our manufacturing operation. He leads an 80-strong team and is also currently planning future expansion projects in the UK and developing a regional presence for manufacturing overseas.
Jerry is looking forward to being part of the future of sequencing technology, the growth and impact of our Diagnostic technology function and playing his part in bringing products to market which have so many applications and opportunities to do good around the world.
Prior to joining Oxford Nanopore Jerry was a Master Black Belt at Abbott Laboratories, and supported the deployment of Lean Six Sigma continuous improvement methodologies in Europe. In his 40 years career he has also worked on the manufacture of medical devices, nutritional products and biotechnology.
Alvaro Correia
Senior Director, Global Supply Chain
Alvaro joined Oxford Nanopore in 2017 and now heads up our global supply chain team.
Alvaro has formalised the supply chain function through upgrading systems and implementing new processes. He has developed a team with broad skills across sourcing and supplier management, warehousing, inventory management, production, demand planning and distribution.
Leading the supply chain function in a disruptive organisation, Alvaro’s goal is to strengthen the business by providing best- in-class supply chain operations. This delivers competitive advantage through firm foundations and systems, solid processes and well trained teams - all primed for targeted growth.
The supply chain’s goal is to operate successfully even in the face of external circumstances. In 2020, this was epitomised by extreme weather and erupting volcanoes to the worldwide pandemic, through which the supply chain team at Oxford Nanopore were able to scale up operations and production volumes.
Alvaro’s experience spans sales, project management, engineering design and production, planning, procurement, inventory and logistics management. Prior to joining Oxford Nanopore he managed the supply chain at Oxford Instruments NanoAnalysis, where he facilitated the relocation of a manufacturing facility and its associated supply chain from the USA to the UK. He’s also worked at Multotec, a German-owned South Africa- based group of manufacturing companies with diversified supply chains.
Alvaro has an MBA from Henley Business School and a Supply Chain Diploma from SAPICS. He also has a BTech in Business Admin, and an HND in Mechanical Engineering, both from the University of Johannesburg.
Hannah Coote
Company Secretary and Legal Director
Hannah is ONT’s Legal Director and Company Secretary. She joined ONT in 2020, having followed our journey for several years, and was attracted by our exciting, disruptive technology and the opportunity to work for a world-changing business.
Hannah specialises in corporate law and advises ONT on a range of matters including corporate transactions, corporate governance, compliance and commercial matters.
As part of an expanding legal team, Hannah is collaborating with her legal colleagues around the world to further establish the legal team as an innovative and pragmatic partner within the business.
Hannah joined ONT from FTSE 250 intellectual property commercialisation company IP Group plc, where she provided legal services to the group and its portfolio of companies. Hannah was also company secretary for AIM-listed AI company Mirriad Advertising plc.
Hannah trained and qualified at US law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, where she specialised in venture capital and M&A transactions with a focus on the technology sector.
Chris Brown
VP, Strategic Programmes
Chris will be instrumental in helping us forge new programmes, ventures and entities from exciting projects, particularly in markets beyond the Life Science research tools sector. As an easy starter (!), Chris is picking up the overall co- ordination of all of the activities going into the formation of our new subsidiary, Oxford Nanopore Diagnostics Ltd, with LamPORE COVID-19 as its first product. Many of us have known Chris for a while, as he joins us from Sharp Corp, where he led the setup of Sharp Life Sciences.
