External Advisory Group

Dr John Shillingford, PhD, holds both a B.Sc. in Biochemistry and a Ph.D. in Biochemical Pharmacology from the University of Surrey.

For the past eight years John has provided a consultancy service to global firms on the development of clinical drug trials and MedTech devices.

Until 2011 and its sale, he held senior global roles at Averion International Corporation, including President of Averion GmbH, President of Averion Europe and Executive Vice President and Global Head of Clinical Operations.

Prior to Averion, he served as Managing Director and Vice President of Clinical Operations of Imform Gmbh.

John has extensive experience of clinical trial design and implementation across the whole of Europe and has successfully commenced and managed operations in Central and Eastern Europe. He has worked in all phases of drug development and has managed clinical research projects in Eastern and Western Europe, North America on behalf of clients from Japan, the USA and Europe. He has over 25 years of Pharmaceutical and Contract Research industry experience.

In addition to his board duties, John’s role at Afon Technology is to oversee the clinical trial activities. His considerable expertise in this sector will ensure that all the trials are designed to strict guidelines to satisfy the appropriate global medical directives.

With over 20 years of board-level experience across several technology domains. Joe has a background in software development and IT; quickly progressing from engineer to CTO, with expertise in areas such as software development, network engineering, information security, wireless and datacentres.

Joe is Chief Executive Officer of Manx Technology Group (MTG), a technology solutions provider with offices in the Isle of Man and Scotland. MTG delivers innovative IT, software and IoT solutions to organisations throughout the world. Prior to MTG, Joe spent ten years as Chief Technical Officer and latterly Managing Director of datacentre and telecoms provider Wi-Manx, who is a provider of hosting, wireless and telecoms solutions.

Joe is a non-executive board member of the Isle of Man Government's Digital Agency, drawing upon his technology and business experience to contribute towards the Island's economic growth. Joe is the driving force behind the Isle of Man Government's IoT accelerator, a public-private body designed to accelerate and develop IoT as a new technology vertical in the Isle of Man.

Tessa spent over 10 years working on some of the largest multi-billion-dollar oil and gas projects around the world. In 2013, she was recognised as a business leader in her field winning the Telstra Businesswomen’s Awards for both Private and Corporate Sector and the Young Business Woman of the Year Awards. This recognised her 7-fold business growth of $50 million energy business she ran for Parsons Brinckerhoff (a Balfour Beatty owned company).  She is currently the Chief Executive Officer of an energy charity in the UK. She brings strong business experience having managed both large and small businesses.

Tessa is a driven, strategic C-Level commercial leader with experience in designing and delivering significant change programmes in the mining, industrial and oil and gas sectors. Tessa is proficient at breaking down complex technical issues to better manage and deliver outcomes. A lateral thinker adept at problem solving, Tessa excels at building relationships across stakeholder groups and mobilising them to focus on a common objective. High board involvement through reporting to boards and running trustee meetings. Tessa is a presence in the board environment, contributing broadly on legal, commercial, financial, marketing, communications, and governance challenges.

Steve has over twenty-five years’ life science and diagnostics experience. His passion is helping build and grow companies bringing them to profitability and supporting management teams to build great businesses of which they can be proud.

He founded Innova Partnerships in 2006 and has been instrumental in creating over a dozen life science start-ups, raising in excess of £100m of finance. Steve has been involved in exiting 3 businesses returning value back to shareholders.

Steve was made Visiting Professor of Commercial Innovation at King's College London in 2015. Formerly, he held senior positions in diagnostics companies, Alere Inc and Unipath Ltd, and in Unilever plc. Steve currently sits on the board of Dxcover and Aureum Diagnostics as non-executive Chairman.

Dr Stephen Little is a British scientist and entrepreneur with a long and successful career in the fields of personalised medicine and molecular diagnostics. Following time spent as a research leader with Celltech and later AstraZeneca PLC he founded the pioneering personalised health company DxS and, following its sale to QIAGEN, went on to establish Premaitha Health (now Yourgene PLC) as a leader in the field of reproductive genetics. He retains an active role at Yourgene and is also enthusiastically involved in the encouragement of exciting and interesting early-stage companies such as Dxcover and BioCaptiva. Stephen currently sits on the board of SMi Drug Discovery as non-executive Chairman.

Brad has over 20 years’ experience working in biotech, providing statistical and bioinformatics support for innovation in a R&D environment. With over 25 peer-reviewed published papers and multiple book chapters using applied statistical methods in biotech, diagnostics and medical devices, Brad excels at working with nontechnical leaders to explain, breakdown and solve highly technical problems.

Brad did his undergraduate through doctoral studies at the University of California, Davis in statistics and applied mathematics. He did both his pre and post doc studies at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Studies in Rostock, Germany where he focused on modelling extreme aging and paleo demographic statistical methods.

After leaving Germany, Brad worked in Silicon Valley designing algorithms for microarrays and genotyping before moving to Washington DC to lead software design for a commercial microarray package. He then worked with Invitrogen in its Corporate Research Lab working with leading medical institutions in the United States including Mayo Clinic, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Centre and Johns Hopkins for rapid cancer diagnostic tools.

Brad became the manager of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics for a CRO, interacting with the FDA on the use of high throughput DNA sequencing techniques to detect vaccine contaminates. In 2009, he began using natural language processing techniques to read millions of papers to provide marketing information on biotech tool usage from PubMed. Brad is currently working with Afon Technology, building algorithms for their non-invasive blood glucose detection medical device, as well as providing statistical analysis of clinical trials for FDA/EMA submission.

John Hirst, CBE, is currently Chairman of BSI (British Standards Institution), NOC (National Oceanography Centre), Anglian Water Group and SMi Systems. He is also a non-executive director of Marsh UK.

Until September 2014 John Hirst was Chief Executive of the Met Office, which he joined in September 2007. As part of this role, he was the UK’s permanent representative to the World Meteorological Organisation where he was a member of the Executive Committee and chaired the Audit Committee. He also sat on the councils for ECMWF and EUMETSAT and was member of the UK Space Board.

During his time as Chief Executive he renewed and reinvigorated the strategic direction of the Met Office, establishing collaborations on science and service with public, academic and private sector organisations worldwide including the UK’s Flood Forecasting Centre, National Hazard Partnership, Environmental Science to Service Partnership and the UK Met Office Academic Partnership. Major successes for the UK Met Office, widely recognised as the best weather and climate service in the world, included helping the Government and its clients appreciate and mitigate the impact of environmental risk, and being named three years in succession in the top 20 social brands in the UK.

John was awarded a CBE in the 2014 New Year’s Honours List for his national and international services to Meteorology.