Prof Mark Gillan is an Advisor to the Vice President of the National Transformation Institute (NTI), at the KAUST. Prior to this Mark was Associate Vice President at KAUST, leading a
diverse portfolio of projects, from coral restoration (KCRI), to Cryogenic Carbon Capture, to KAUST SMART, which has a sustainability and integrated multimodal transport focus.

Mark studied Aeronautical Engineering at Queens’ University of Belfast, obtaining a First Class Honours Degree, followed by a Doctorate in Aeronautical Engineering. Mark is both a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and a Chartered Engineer. Mark has led a mixture of UK and EU funded programmes, securing over GBP100M in competitive grant funding.
He has held various engineering leadership roles within industry, elite sports, academia and the public sector. In over a decade in F1 he was Chief Race Engineer for both Jaguar/Red Bull and Williams.

In academia he held the inaugural Sir George Edwards Chair in Aerospace Engineering, at the University of Surrey. As CTO of Innovate UK, Mark ran both the Strategy and Impact and the Centres and Networks Governance Directorates, that included oversight of the UK’s extensive Catapult Network.

Mark is also a Visiting Professor of both Surrey and Ulster Universities.