Geoff is Project Development Manager for Ceres Agri-Tech, a knowledge-exchange partnership between 5 Universities and 3 Research Institutes in the UK.
Ceres Agri-Tech is led by Cambridge Enterprise, the Technology Transfer arm of the University of Cambridge, and helps to connect and upskill partner Universities in commercialisation by supporting collaborative Agri-Tech projects. Ceres Agri-Tech works with projects to give both expertise and significant translational investment in order to take research out of the lab and towards the market.
Prior to this role, Geoff was a member of the Technology Transfer team at Cambridge Enterprise and both co-wrote the bid for Ceres and co-ordinated the establishment of all elements of the Ceres project following the award of £4.8 million from Research England’s Connecting Capability Fund in 2018.
Geoff has extensive experience in research management within academia and industry both in the UK and USA, and in collaborative commercial development through to licensing and start-up for early-stage technologies in agri-tech and across the life sciences. Geoff has worked as an independent research consultant in the development of commercial genetic testing and worked as a Senior Molecular Microbiologist at the James Hutton Institute, working in a wide range of areas including agricultural, industrial and environmental microbial profiling and epidemiology, and mitochondrial DNA profiling. Prior to this Geoff had an extensive postdoctoral career as a microbial geneticist in areas including environmental gene-flow from GM crops, and the evolution of bacterial resistance in the UK and of nitrogen fixation symbioses in Central and South America. Geoff holds a PhD in Microbial Genetics from the University of Liverpool and also attained a Graduate Diploma in Law in 2015.