About Us.

David Leahy

Prof. David Leahy was a Senior Executive with what is now AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals before leaving to found Cyprotex, an information company supporting research by 150 Pharmaceutical companies world-wide. Having led Cyprotex through start-up, MBO and IPO on the London Stock Exchange he left the company to work on new business ventures and academic research at Newcastle University, UK as part of the Newcastle Science City initiative. He holds a "Professor of Practice" position in the Business School and has a research group in Computer-Aided Molecular Design funded by Cancer Research UK. He has been active in scientific software development applied to drug discovery as a developer, manager and entrepreneur for over 25 years.

Joanna Berry

Joanna Berry completed her first degree in Law at St Anne's College, Oxford. Having set up and run three successful businesses, Joanna went on to take her MBA with distinction at Newcastle University Business School in 2003, where she is now Academic Director of Executive MBA Programmes. She continues to take part in business start up mentoring and advice programmes and as part of her PhD research she has worked as Communications Director for a London based record label and social/business networking software company, MVINE. Joanna lectures in Management Consultancy, Small Business and Entrepreneurship and Strategic Marketing for the Executive MBA, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Business Consultancy, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and both Chair for the North East branch of the CIM and Board Member for the North East Region of the CIM.

Prof. Paul Watson

Prof. Paul Watson is Professor of Computer Science and Director of the North East Regional e-Science Centre at Newcastle University, UK. In the 80's, as a Lecturer at Manchester University, he was a designer of the Alvey Flagship and Esprit EDS systems. From 1990-5 he worked for ICL as a system designer of the Goldrush MegaServer parallel database server, which was released as a product in 1994. This is the only work in a non-US company that was credited by the US National Academy of Sciences "Innovation in Information Technology" report as creating a billion-dollar segment of the IT industry. In August 1995 he moved to Newcastle University, where he has been an investigator on research projects worth over $40M. His research interests are in scalable information management. This includes data-intensive e-science, grid and cloud computing.

Dr Hugo Hiden

Dr Hugo Hiden is the Technical Director of the UK North Eastern Regional e-Science Centre (NEReSC) at Newcastle University. His primary responsibility is the technical co-ordination of the various research projects within the centre. Prior to this, he spent 6 years in industry developing advanced data integration, analysis and modeling tools at Avantium Technologies and GSE Systems Inc. Hugo holds a PhD in the application of Genetic Programming to chemical process data analysis and has published numerous papers on the subjects of process monitoring, computer security and collaborative R&D.

Keith Cotteril

Successful technology entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and Europe with multiple successful exits. Extensive experience of technology, sales and management in companies such as SAP, Oracle and Netscape before building a succession of start-up companies including Webify Solutions and Commerce One. Graduate of Oxford University and a Chartered Accountant since 1988