Seminar: How to get started with a company: challenges and opportunities

We welcome Andrew M. Beale, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry, UCL and CSO / Co-Founder of Finden Ltd. as our guest speaker for this MAPS IE Seminar: How to get started with a company: challenges and opportunities.

Back to All Events

Seminar: How to get started with a company: challenges and opportunities

19 Oct 2022, 14:00 – 15:00

Finden Ltd. is ten years old next month!

In this talk, Andrew will outline how an idea to tap into the “third funding stream” has evolved from a part-time, two-person effort into a SME with ten employees. The talk will:

Highlight the sometimes painful “on the job” learning process;
Identify what Finden Ltd. understood to be the critical moments for their existence;
Explain how Finden Ltd. has morphed into an organisation quite different to what they had initially envisaged;
Present what Andrew sees as challenges and opportunities for those wishing to embark on a similar journey.

Andrew will also draw attention to the benefits that Finden Ltd. brings to his academic career.

Via Zoom, contact Ethne James-Souch (e.james-souch@ucl.ac.uk) for joining information. Click on the registration button to email Ethne for the Zoom details.

More on the Speaker: Andrew M Beale, Professor of Inorganic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry

Andrew Beale is a Professor of Inorganic Chemistry, Group leader at the Research Complex at Harwell, Chief Scientific Officer of Finden Ltd. and a management group member of the EPSRC-sponsored UK Catalyis Hub.

He was awarded a BSc from the University of Sussex followed by a PhD at the Royal Institution of Great Britain on the subject of in situ X-ray crystallisation studies of mixed oxide materials. He then worked as a Postdoctoral fellow, VENI research fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of Inorganic Chemistry and Catalysis at Utretcht University in the Netherlands. Andrew then returned to the UK and to UCL in 2013 as an EPSRC Early Career Fellow.

His interests lie in establishing structure-function relationships in materials, including catalytic solids and energy storage as a function of both time and space using X-ray and optical spectroscopic and scattering methods applied under in situ and operando conditions.

In 2012, he co-founded Finden Ltd. providing high-end characterisation of solid-state functional materials spanning the fields of catalysis, energy, automotive parts and pharmaceuticals.

He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the most recent receipient of their Peter Day award.