Louise Farrand

As Innovation Fellow at the Centre for Enzyme Innovation (CEI) at the University of Portsmouth, my job is to support innovation and impact from the CEI research outputs.

This is primarily achieved by establishing collaborative partnerships, and facilitating the transfer of technologies, skills and knowledge to industry and other end-users.

I develop and implement strategies to enhance the capacity and capability for knowledge exchange and innovation, such as increasing technology readiness levels and finding appropriate impact outputs.

Biography

I graduated from the University of Nottingham with a BSc in Chemistry, and completed a PhD at the University of Sheffield in Liquid Crystals. After a year in Hitachi, Japan, I joined Merck Chemicals in the UK as an R&D Scientist specialising in display chemistries. I worked my way to manage a large international team of materials scientists, leading on Intellectual Property strategies and academic partnerships. I have over 120 patents and papers in nanomaterials, polymer and chiral molecules. At Merck, I then pursued a role in Technology Scouting and was Associate Director of Partnerships and Technology Scouting looking for new opportunities for collaboration and investment.

I left Merck in 2019 to start as Operations Director at The University of Manchester Innovation Factory.  Here, I led a large multi-disciplinary team responsible for the identification, assessment and work-up of business cases originating from across all of the faculties at The University of Manchester for new spin-out and licensing opportunities. These translated opportunities all had potential to create significant social, environmental and economic impact, contributing to a record breaking year in technology transfer at Manchester University.