I am the Head of the Greenhouse Climate Innovation start-up accelerator at Undaunted which is part of the Grantham Institute, Imperial College. I’ve essentially come full circle as my first degree was in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial. On graduation, I worked in engineering consulting for a short period before following a traditional academic path with a PhD in Fluid Mechanics at Cambridge University, followed by a post-doctoral position and then a Lectureship in the Aeronautics Dept. at Queen Mary, University of London.

I left academia and joined BMW/Rover to address more real-world challenges, working in both the UK and Germany, before moving to another engineering consultancy to build a new virtual product design business. Starting a new business, albeit within an existing business, was a new challenge that initiated my interest in entrepreneurship and so I studied for a MBA at London Business School. On graduation I was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug and have been running my own business for 15 years, selling the last business to our US partners in 2019. I went through the full entrepreneurial journey with this business, from inventing and patenting a new device to raising capital, building and scaling the business to distribution in 20 countries and an eventual trade sale.

Since existing the business I have been working with university technology start-ups and took the position at the Greenhouse to take this further and drive the adoption of technology to address climate change, coming full circle, back to Imperial, in the process.