Board

Dr Andy Richards (Chairman)

Dr Andy Richards is a serial entrepreneur and business angel. He has invested in more than 25 private companies and has played an active role in many of these. He is currently Chairman of Altacor, IXICO and Novacta and is a director of Vectura plc, Summit plc, Theradeas, Cancer Research Technology (commercial arm of CR-UK) and Babraham Bioscience Technology.

Andy is a Cambridge University natural sciences graduate and has a PhD in Protein Chemistry. He spent his early career in research with ICI (now AstraZeneca) and consulting with PA Technology. He was a founder of Chiroscience in 1992 and an executive director through to the sale to Celltech in 1999. Since that time he has been founding and investing in new lifescience companies including several of those listed above as well as Arakis, Geneservice, Cambridge Biotechnology Ltd, Amedis Pharmaceuticals, Sirus Pharmaceuticals Daniolabs and Pharmakodex, all of which were recently sold. He is a member of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), a founder member of the Cambridge Angels, the founding Chairman of BIA Bioangels and an advisor to Toscana Life Sciences. He also advises a number of leading venture capital and private equity funds.

Prof. Derek Hill (Founder and CEO)
Derek Hill is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of IXICO. He founded IXICO to bring the best possible imaging technology and know-how to the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. Derek also holds an academic appointment as Full Professor at University College London. He took a BSc degree in Physics at Imperial College, an MSc in Medical Physics at University of Surrey, a PhD in medical image analysis at the Medical School of Guy's & St Thomas' Hospitals, University of London, and business training at the London Business School through the CSEL programme. He was appointed a lecturer (assistant professor) in 1995. He was appointed full professor in September 2004, shortly before co-founding IXICO. He has been working on medical image analysis for nearly 20 years, and has authored more than 60 journal papers in this field. His research track record includes image acquisition and analysis, image acquisition and analysis for drug discovery and development, other aspects of image acquisition including motion correction and partially parallel imaging in MRI and motion compensation in PET. He has worked on applications in the study of dementia, heart disease, arthritis, oncology and guiding interventions. Much of this work was in collaboration with the medical imaging, medical device and pharmaceutical industries. He is a member of the MRI Core of the ADNI project, is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, and is a member of the ISMRM safety committee and the ISMRM Ad Hoc Committee on Standards for Quantitative MR.

Prof. Jo Hajnal (Founder)
Jo Hajnal is Head of the Imaging Physics and Engineering Group, Head of the Robert Steiner MR Unit and of the Imaging Sciences Department at the Hammersmith Hospital Campus of Imperial College, as well as Chairman of the In Vivo Imaging Section of the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, a UK national research institute dedicated to integrating basic with Clinical Science. He trained as a physicist at Bristol University, England, UK and obtained a PhD in the physics of electromagnetic waves before working in Australia at Melbourne University and the ANU on interactions between atomic beams and laser light. In 1990 he began research in medical imaging with a special interest in MRI. His current research interests include MR data acquisition and processing, image registration and data fusion as well as novel scanner technology, parallel imaging and motion artefact correction. He has invented and pioneered techniques that are now widely used in the medical imaging industry, published over a hundred papers in peer reviewed journals and is currently holder of nine grants from a variety of funding organisations. He is a member of the board of the international Society of Magnetic Resonance in Medicine.

Peter Hudson Ellis, C.H.E., A.H.A. (Non-Executive Director)
Mr Ellis is currently Executive Director of People in Health. Prior to joining People in Health he was head of Arthur D Little's health industry practice and prior to that, a senior partner in Ernst & Young's Global Consulting life sciences practice. Mr Ellis has over 30 years of experience in managing and consulting in the health industry in the UK, North America and Europe. Before his return to the UK in 1996 he was the President and Chief Executive Officer of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Corporation in Toronto. Mr Ellis' specific areas of expertise and interest include: health system policy, strategic alliance development; research and development strategies; mergers and acquisitions; integrated delivery systems; growth and innovation strategies; customer and market strategies; management information systems. Mr Ellis has also taken an active interest in international health policy issues and has, either as a government appointee or industry representative, led or been a member of many commissions or task forces charged with improving healthcare systems. Mr Ellis has led assignments in large multi-national pharmaceutical companies, emerging biotech companies, medical device organizations, large academic health sciences centres, governments and provider organizations across the health industry. Mr. Ellis is also chairman of VisionRT, a company that is in the process of bringing to market a novel radiotherapy patient positioning system that will improve the accuracy and effectiveness of radiation treatment. Mr Ellis is an Honorary Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, Health Management Division, University of Toronto.

Sir Colin Dollery (Non-Executive Director)
Sir Colin Dollery has been a senior consultant to Research and Development in GlaxoSmithKline, and before that in SmithKline Beecham, for 9 years. He is particularly concerned with the discovery-development interface when new drugs transfer from the laboratory to early studies in man. In GlaxoSmithKline he is an adviser to Dr Yamada the Chairman of Research and Development and he serves on the committees that review all protocols for human research, on the Development Investment Board and on the Global Safety Board that reviews all issues related to safety including approval for first administration of a new drug to man. Prior to joining GSK and SB Sir Colin spent his academic career at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School of the University of London at Hammersmith Hospital in west London.

Prof. Sir Michael Brady (Non-Executive Director)
Professor Sir Michael Brady FRS, FREng is BP Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford. Professor Brady combines his work at Oxford University, where he founded the Robotics Laboratory and the Medical Vision Laboratory (MVL), with a range of entrepreneurial activities. He is Director of the EPSRC/MRC Inter-disciplinary research consortium on "From Medical Images and Signals to Clinical Information". He was appointed Senior Research Scientist of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1980, and helped found its world famous robotics laboratory. In 1985, he left MIT to take up a newly created Professorship in Information Engineering. Professor Brady serves as a non-executive director and Deputy Chairman of Oxford Instruments plc, until December 2003 as a non-executive director of AEA Technology, and, Isis Innovation (Oxford University's intellectual property company). Professor Brady is a founding Director of the start-up companies Guidance, which develops navigation systems for mobile robots and for dynamic ship positioning and electronic tags, and Mirada Solutions Limited which sells medical image analysis software, in particular Reveal MVS for multimodal image fusion. Mirada Solutions was acquired in 2003 by CTI Molecular Imaging Inc (NASDAQ) and CTI was acquired in turn by Siemens in April 2005, becoming Siemens Molecular Imaging. Michael Brady continues as a consultant to Siemens Molecular Imaging, and director of GCS. Most recently, Professor Brady has been an investor and Senior Independent Director of Ixico. He is also consultant to the Translational Medicine and Genetics group of GSK, where he is external coordinator of imaging in oncology. Professor Brady is the author of over 400 articles and 18 patents in computer vision, robotics, medical image analysis, and artificial intelligence, and the author or editor of nine books, including: Robot Motion (MIT Press 1984), Robotics Science (MIT Press 1989), Robotics Research (MIT Press 1984), Mammographic Image Analysis (Kluwer, January 1999) and Images and Artefacts of the Ancient World (British Academy, 2005). He was Editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal (1987-2002), and founding Editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research (1981-2000). He is a member of the Editorial Board of fourteen journals, most recently Medical Image Analysis. Professor Brady was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) in 1991 and a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK) in 1997. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and a founding Fellow of the Association of Artificial Intelligence, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and a Fellow of the British Computing Society. He is a member of the Conseil Scientifique de l'INRIA France. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Essex, Manchester, Liverpool, Southampton, Oxford Brookes, and Paul Sabatier (Toulouse). He was awarded the IEE Faraday Medal for 2000 and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal for the UK. He was awarded the Henry Dale Prize (for "outstanding work on a biological topic by means of an original multidisciplinary approach") by the Royal Institution in 2005. Professor Brady was knighted in the New Year's honours list for 2003.