Team
An ambitious group of passionate entrepreneurs and operators
Mark
Founding Director
Mark started his career with a PhD in Neuropharmacology and Artificial Intelligence working on better models for the development of epilepsy and neurodegeneration therapeutics, he then worked in cleantech venture before going on to build out Imperial College’s deep-tech start-up accelerator and academic spin-out ecosystem, facilitating several exits to the major tech companies before leaving to start DSV in 2016.
Dom
Founding Director
Dom previously led Imperial College London’s science startup programme: worked with over 200 student companies, and supported a fraction of these to raise over £25m in funding within 3 years. Grew community 375% to 3000 scientists in 1 year. Left Imperial in 2016 to co-found DSV, recognised as one of Forbes Finance Under 30 in 2021.
Ahmad
Executive Chairman
Ahmad is a serial entrepreneur with 25 years in finance and deep tech, as a founder, investor, operator and mentor. Most recently, he founded, scaled and exited a multi-billion AUM quant hedge fund. Has been an advisor to Deep Science Ventures since 2017 and also an investor. He is founders circle at IFOW, mentor at CDL, Zinc and Transcend Networks. Ahmad is also an early stage investor in deep tech, AI and climate companies with 60+ investments.
Santa
Director, Talent
Santa led commercial development at an envirotech startup while completing her Masters Degree in Commerce, specialising in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She then joined world-leading deep-tech incubator Cicada Innovations, where she was in charge of admissions and a junior business mentor. She then co-developed and managed what has now become the most successful medtech commercialisation training program in Australia before joining DSV to lead creation of brand new founding teams and first hires.
Eddie
Director, Agriculture
Eddy holds a BSc in Bioveterinary Science from London’s Royal Veterinary College and an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise from the University of Cambridge. He formerly co-founded Desktop Genetics, a provider of CRISPR genome editing tools and in 2017 he was listed on the Forbes 30 Under 30. In addition to developing science companies to transform the way humans produce and consume food at DSV, Eddy also serves on the IUCN Synthetic Biology.
Adam
Director, Climate
Adam’s career has focused on applied science innovation and new business development, spanning both corporate innovation/R&D and venture-backed startups. He holds a PhD and MSci in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and Imperial College London, respectively. He worked in Johnson Matthey’s innovation team and strategic development groups focusing on energy storage and transmission, syngas technologies, alternative fuels, CCU/CCS, carbon dioxide conversion and hydrogen generation. Following this, he led commercial efforts as Chief Commercial Officer at venture-backed start-up LabGenius (machine learning-enabled biotech) where he focused on business development and commercial strategy to secure corporate partnerships and VC.
Kerstin
Director, Pharma
Kerstin started her PhD at German Cancer Research Centre and then moved to a lab at Imperial College to work on novel treatment options within the field of tumour immunology. She since has spent almost ten years in leadership roles at impact-driven organisations advancing medicine and therapeutics, while also securing an executive MBA and a women in business award. Before joining DSV to develop science companies designing more effective personalised therapies, Kerstin was transforming ideas for cutting edge cell and gene therapies into investable propositions at UK’s Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult.
Noah
Head of Business Development and Venture Portfolio, Climate
Prior to DSV, Noah founded LIC, an award-winning beverage company, and developed patented packaging, a vertically-integrated supply chain and co-brands with major alcohol brands such as Bombay Sapphire and Malibu. He raised over £1.5m in investment and launched LIC into retailers across Europe and the USA. Noah holds a Masters in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London and is currently Consumer Expert-in-Residence there.
Laura
Head of Business Development and Venture Portfolio, Pharma
Prior to joining DSV, Laura was Associate Director of Cancer Research UK’s Commercial Partnerships team, heading the Strategic Alliances function which drives the charity’s strategic drug discovery and platform relationships with a range of commercial partners. Her other experience at CRUK and Cancer Research Technology over 14 years included transacting a wide range of significant license, collaboration and spin out deals. She holds a 1st class degree in Biochemistry and a PhD in cell signalling from the University of Bristol and has additionally worked in academic and commercial research roles in the US and the UK.
Pina
Head of Scoping, Climate
After her BSc and MSc at ETH in Zurich Pina started her career with building an electrochemical separation process for protein purification during a PhD program at Wageningen University and Nanyang Technological University. Afterwards, she worked with different start-ups, accelerators and VCs focusing on novel technologies in the energy and food tech space. This included a project with StartLife, a leading agrifoodtech accelerator, and Octopus Ventures. At DSV Pina is scoping business opportunities that help to move the needle on the climate crisis e.g. negative emissions technologies and carbon neutral fuels.
Aaron
Head of Programme, Venture Science Doctorate
Aaron is a graduate of Harvard University where he received a masters degree focused on design for learning. He has spent the last decade working as a lead designer for companies that are building science and entrepreneurship learning communities...ranging from NYC's Quest to Learn—the world's first game-based learning school, ALU—a startup that's scaling a network of modern universities across Africa, and most recently for On Deck—a San Francisco based startup accelerator that has helped founders learn how to start 1,000+ companies and raise over $2 billion from investors.
Eirini
Head of Founder Community
Eirini is a design engineer and entrepreneur. Since 2014, she has developed new projects, products and programmes across academia, industrial research labs, national research centres and startups. Before DSV, she was the founder of the award-winning, VC backed education tech startup Filisia. More recently, she oversaw project development on AI for Climate Action at the Alan Turing Institute. She has also worked as a researcher at the Morphological Computation Lab at Imperial College, Microsoft Research, and Nesta. Eirini holds a joint MA/MSc in Innovation Design Engineering from Imperial College London and the Royal College of Art.
Francesco
Head of Machine Learning Engineering
Francesco began his career as a full-stack engineer before transitioning to a healthcare startup, where he joined the natural language processing team. During his time there, he focused on tasks such as information extraction, anonymisation, and named entity recognition. He then moved into research, developing language models to generate medical notes from consultation transcripts. He completed a PhD on evaluating the quality of medical note generation before joining DSV as Head of ML Engineering.
Anís
Senior Associate, Pharma
Anís began his career in the biopharma industry, pursuing immunology & fibrosis research at UCB, cancer epigenetics research at Boehringer Ingelheim, and GMP Quality Assurance at Lonza Biologics. He was later a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford, where his PhD explored the immune microenvironment in breast cancer using single-cell genomics. He also holds an MSc in Immunology from the University of Oxford, a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Manchester, and has co-authored research articles published in high-impact journals including Nature Genetics. At DSV, Anís helps build companies that may have curative potential for a range of diseases across the oncology and immunology space.
Thane
Dean, Venture Science Doctorate
Thane holds an MSc in Healthcare Innovation and Entrepreneurship and a PhD in immunology where he combined enzyme kinetics, fluorescent biomarkers and a neural network API to predict immune responses, in collaboration with GSK. Within Innovation Forum his work to help PhD students commercialise their research received a knowledge transfer award, and in his first year working at Edinburgh Innovations he championed their partnership with DSV to launch Scotland’s first venture builder. At DSV Thane designs a doctoral training programme where graduates forecast their industry’s next iteration, conduct the necessary scientific research and commercialise it. Science companies created during the Venture Science Doctorate will meet societal needs in AI and complex legacy sectors like healthcare, energy and agriculture.
Angel
Associate, Agriculture
Angel holds a BSc in Biology from the Universidad de Puerto Rico–Mayagüez and a Ph.D. in Plant Breeding and Plant Genetics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has dedicated most of his career to fundamental and applied plant biotechnology research, focusing on enhancing crop productivity, adding value traits, and developing pipelines. Before joining DSV, he was the Project Leader in Plant Molecular Genetics at the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center (HARC), leading the gene-editing research and development pipeline for tropical crops.
Mildred
Associate, Agriculture
Mildred holds a B.Eng degree in Biotechnology, and a MSc. in Nanotechnology from Tecnologico de Monterrey. Before DSV she worked as a Research Associate at the Molecular Nanosystems Research Group from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program, and at The Sustainable Manufacturing Research Group at Tecnologico de Monterrey. Additionally, Mildred co-founded The Bridge Biofoundry, an organization that aims to promote bioentrepreneurship in Central America through specialized infrastructure and innovation services. She also worked at the Innovation and Bioeconomy Office of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), where she conducted the strategic design of a Bioentrepreneurship Hub for Latin America and the Caribbean. More recently, Mildred joined the Kirchner Impact Foundation through their impact investment fellowship, where she focused on the funding of early-stage Mexican companies in the food and agriculture sectors.
Will
Associate, Agriculture
Will holds a BSc in Biology from the University of Sheffield and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he studied the molecular basis of plant-microbe interactions. Since then, he has worked on the Gates Foundation funded ENSA project (Enabling Nitrogen Symbiosis for Africa) and at the International Livestock Research Institute to assess a climate-smart feedstock for dairy farmers. Before joining DSV, he was Head of Funding Delivery for Strategic Programmes at UKRI-BBSRC, working with stakeholders across academia, government and business to design investment programmes that advance biological knowledge and address global issues.
Eric
Associate, Climate
Eric began his research career in protein and agriscience before pivoting to applied solar material research. Both his Masters at Imperial College London and his PhD at ETH Zurich focused on the field of sustainable solar fuels and electrochemistry. In addition to his research, much of Eric's past 10 years focused on building and leading organisations over a wide range of disciplines from a direct air capture CO2 startup, to political representation, to an award-winning mental health nonprofit, among a few others. At DSV, Eric scopes deep tech business opportunities to reverse global heating and ensure our sustainable energy transition.
Katie
Associate, Climate
Katherine has spent her career working at the interface of research and industry on emerging technologies for net-zero emissions. During her time as a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford, Katherine worked for the Energy and Power Group and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment on topics such as vehicle-to-grid, electricity distribution networks, green hydrogen, decarbonising transport in sub-Saharan Africa, bio-based sources of carbon, alternative proteins, and nature-based greenhouse gas removal. Katherine holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford on high-efficiency solar photovoltaics.
Lukas
Associate, Climate
Lukas is a mechanical engineer by training with a background in energy systems. He previously worked at the Research Centre for Carbon Solutions at Heriot-Watt University, where he explored obstacles and required actions to scale direct air capture of CO2, as well as technologies to decarbonise the UK industries - with a focus on steel and cement manufacturing. In prior roles, Lukas worked on technological transition pathways to decarbonise the transport sector, a topic he researched during his PhD at ETH Zurich. At DSV, Lukas scopes for technical solutions and assists new founders with the venture creation process to reverse global warming.
Mia
Associate, Climate
Mia has a background in chemistry, with experience in quantum-mechanical modelling and chemical crystallography. Before DSV, she was a founding team member working as the science lead at a climate tech start-up, creating and developing new carbon utilisation and ocean-based carbon dioxide removal technologies. She holds a PhD and MChem in chemistry from University College London and the University of Oxford, respectively, and has published in high-impact journals, including Nature Communications. At DSV, Mia scopes opportunity areas and builds companies that decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors and remediate historic emissions.
Rahul
Associate, Climate
Rahul previously worked for PA Consulting across a broad range of industries, from medical diagnostics to early-stage green technology and FMCG food packaging and manufacturing. Prior to this, he worked for the European Space Agency, developing a high-precision charging method for accelerated testing of Li-ion batteries, and Jaguar Land Rover's Low Carbon Vehicles division. Rahul has also completed stints at ARM's GPU division and in thermal engineering for aerospace. He has an MEng in Mechanical Engineering from Imperial College London, where he completed a Masters thesis focused on Li-sulphur battery modelling.
Jana
Associate, Pharma
Jana holds a BSc in Biochemistry from the University of Leeds, where she undertook a placement year at UCB BioPharma in Belgium, working on validating novel biomarkers of drug-induced injury. She then joined the Wellcome Trust “Cell Therapies and Regenerative Medicine” 1+3 (MRes/PhD) programme at King’s College London, where her PhD thesis was centred around generating CAR T cells targeting NKG2D stress ligands, with a particular focus on solid tumours. At DSV, Jana is helping to scope new opportunities and curative solutions, and support the building of companies across a range of therapeutic areas.
Jonathan
Associate, Pharma
Jonathan specialises in molecular medicine and has a particular interest in genetic engineering and epigenetics. He studied molecular genetics and pharmacology at King’s College London (BSc) before starting his PhD at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, Jonathan’s MRC- funded research addressed intra-cellular immune responses to foreign genetic material and formed the basis of gene therapy-enhancing technology.
Megan
Associate, Pharma
Megan developed her hands-on expertise in cell biology, biochemistry, in vivo models and cancer biology during her PhD at the University of Toronto and post-doctoral work at Cancer Research UK's London Research Institute (now part of the Crick). She then spent nearly 10 years as an editor and news writer on various Nature journals, mainly Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, where she covered topics including drug delivery, gene therapy, screening strategies, neurobiology and infectious diseases. At DSV, Megan helps build companies that could have curative potential in diverse areas including cell and gene therapies and neurodegeneration.
Sam
Associate, Systems Engineering
Sam started his career in Artificial Intelligence and Systems Design after his BSc in Informatics, co-founding BACE Group; an AI startup in Ghana. He led the company as both its CEO and Lead Engineer for 3 years before joining DSV to lead the design of algorithms and development of systems for knowledge and talent discovery.
Andrés
Associate, Talent
Andrés started his career as a recruiter in the Finance industry after completing his BA in Politics & Sociology at Newcastle University. He then shifted to the Fintech space where he hired for roles across all departments but specialised in Quant and Data Engineering. Before joining DSV, he built out the internal talent acquisition function for SigTech, an organisation behind an industry-leading Quant SaaS platform, closing over 30 openings throughout a 10-month period and saving the business over £2m in agency fees. At DSV, Andrés oversees all-things-HR, Core-team hiring, and supports Founders-In-Residence hiring.