Team
Giovanni Stracquadanio, PhD
Co-founder
Dr Giovanni Stracquadanio is an Personal Chair in Engineering Biology at the University of Edinburgh. He is an UKRI EPSRC fellow and co-director of the Edinburgh Genome Foundry. He has more than 15 years of experience in AI, computational biology and microbiology to address biomedical challenges. He was co-author of the first synthetic eukaryotic chromosome and has characterised the role of high-frequency inherited mutations in the p53 pathway. He is now working on engineering new enzyme replacement therapies for Fabry diseases using AI and microbial expression systems.
Susan Rosser, PhD
Co-founder
Dr Susan Rosser is Professor of Synthetic Biology at the University of Edinburgh. She is Director of the Edinburgh Mammalian Synthetic Biology Research Centre, Co-director of the Edinburgh Genome Foundry. Her research focuses on developing tools for synthetic biology approaches for pathway and genome engineering in bacteria, yeast and mammalian cell systems. The applications of her work include rapid cell line engineering for biologics production.
Michael Roberts, PhD
Commercial Champion
Michael Roberts is the Chief Executive Officer of Chromatin Bioscience Ltd. Previously, he established Synpromics and was its founder & CSO until it was acquired by AskBio in 2019. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees at Medical Research Scotland and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology.
Barbara Blaney, PhD
Business Manager
Senior Enterprise Executive at Edinburgh Innovations, the University of Edinburgh’s commercialisation service. With over 20 years commercialisation experience ranging from advising SME's on business strategy and partnering to working for major multinationals including Johnson & Johnson, Boehringer and BASF, Barbara supports academic staff working with high-growth potential projects from idea/concept through to growth and investment stages where she has been involved in the creation of a number of life science spinout companies.