UCL ENTERPRISE

UCL Awards for Enterprise 2012 Winners

UCL Business Award Winner 2012

Professor David Selwood
David has been very engaged with UCL Business throughout many years at UCL. He spent several years at Wellcome Research labs, now part of GlaxoSmithKline and when he came to UCL he continued in his drug discovery work. David’s commercial experience has been telling. This is most clearly evident by the number of projects he has worked on which have had, or do have, a commercial output.

Notably he has been involved in three start-up companies: ProAxon, NCE Discovery and Canbex. NCE Discovery merged with another drug discovery company Domainex that has full pre-clinical drug discovery capabilities. Canbex has a clinical candidate which for the treatment of Multiple Sclerosis associated spasticity and has recently received over £2 million in funding from the MS Association and the Wellcome Trust.

UCL Business Award ‘One to Watch’ 2012

Professor Neal Skipper and Dr Chris Howard
(Separation and Purification of Carbon Nanotubes)
Based in the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) our One to Watch winners have worked closely with UCL Business over the past few years to help commercialise their novel process to separate and purify carbon nanotubes. Their process could help unlock the huge commercial potential of carbon nanotubes by providing a means to separate semiconducting tubes from metallic.

Building upon fundamental research funded by the EPSRC, the team were successful in securing follow-on-funding which bought the technology to a readiness level that interested a commercial partner. The partner was Linde Group, a world-leading gases and engineering company. Linde funded further process development in the LCN to investigate scale-up potential and eventually entered into an exclusive licence agreement with UCLB to commercialise the technology.

UCL Corporate Enterprise Partner of the Year 2012

BHP Billiton
UCL's partnership with BHP Billiton, driven by three Vice Provosts from Research, Enterprise and International, is, arguably, our most significant corporate partnership to date. BHP Billiton is the world's largest mining and resources company, with more than 100 operations in over 25 countries. This dual-hemisphere $US 10 million partnership, signed in June 2011, has established UCL’s Institute for Sustainable Resources in London and our International Energy Policy Institute in Adelaide, Australia. The two new institutes will drive research into the complex economic, legal, environmental, technological and cultural issues faced by the resources sector and provide a framework within which expertise from the northern and southern hemispheres can be shared and innovative responses developed.

UCL Small to Medium Enterprise Partner of the Year 2012

Rosemary Drake, TAP Biosystems
TAP Biosystems are working with UCL to jointly develop a product called Real Architecture for 3D Tissues or RAFT. This is a genuine partnership where joint IP has been generated from four successful TSB awards totaling £3.5M. Know how has been generated and disseminated both nationally and internationally, promoting the value of UCL research and the close collaboration has earned innovation awards and promoted new collaborations with other UCL researchers. TAP Biosystems’ supportive, knowledgeable and collaborative approach represents industry-academic partnering at its best.

UCL Consultants Award 2012

Dr Vanessa Diaz
Vanessa is leading a project that aims to produce a roadmap for the realisation of the ‘Digital VPH Patient. The Digital Patient is a method of integrating diverse computational models and individual data to produce a computational patient avatar. This would allow revolutionary health prediction and disease treatment when the ‘Digital Me’ of a citizen needs to avail itself of health services. The project is worth a total of 1.3m euros.

UCL Social Enterprise Project of the Year 2012

Heritage Without Borders
Heritage Without Borders are transforming the role of archaeological conservation training in developing countries. Their proactive approach to capacity building, with strong ethical concerns, has provided a platform for exciting collaborations; most recently in Bosnia & Herzegovina and Turkmenistan. They have harnessed the enthusiasm of professional conservators across the UK and channeled this into programmes to build the intellectual and technical skills needed in the protection and utilisation of cultural resources. This initiative has given UCL a leading role in the field and has already attracted significant financial support from a wide range of donors. Heritage Without Borders have started to work in earnest this year, delivering their first project and demonstrating their services.

UCL SMILE Best Mentor Award 2012

Nasir Zubairi
Nasir has great passion and appetite to help entrepreneurs, start-ups and SMEs above and beyond the normal hours and efforts required of a mentor

UCL Advances Bright Ideas 2012

• Bright Ideas Winners

London Entrepreneurs’ Challenge 2011/2012

Winner – Sycle/Jive
Runners Up – SmartSearch and Ju$txt
Vice-Provost’s Prize – Neighbourfood

UCL Provost’s Spirit of Enterprise Award 2012

Prof Philip Treleaven
Philip has always been actively involved in entrepreneurial activities in the School of Engineering. He set up the first undergraduate course and was instrumental in setting up the first related MSc in the School. Philip has consistently created companies, encouraged entrepreneurs, taught entrepreneurship, practised entrepreneurship, in short been one of the key drivers in bringing UCL to be an entrepreneurial place.

Philip is a director of 3 companies and serves on the Advisory Board of a Venture Capital company. Philip is director of the Financial Computing Centre and is responsible for the UK PhD Centre for Financial Computing, a joint doctoral training centre involving UCL, LBS, LSE and 15 major financial institutions. Philip also carries out a lot of consultancy work with UCL Consultants.

Previously Philip was Pro-Provost, responsible for UCL’s Internal Relations with Asia, specifically South East and East Asia.

UCL Lifetime Achievement Award 2012

Professor Roger Ekins
We do not make a lifetime achievement award every year, but when there is a deserving candidate we reserve the right to recognise them in a special way. Prof Roger Ekins was nominated in recognition of his role in pioneering paradigm-shifting, analytical technologies that have revolutionised medical research and diagnostics and had enormous commercial impact.

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