Jan Chojecki is Managing Director of Plant Bioscience Limited (PBL). PBL is an independent intellectual property management and technology development company that specializes in protecting and commercializing IP and technology emerging from public sector research institutions.
PBL was established in 1994 and is owned by The John Innes Centre, The Sainsbury Laboratory and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). BBSRC, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI, a non-departmental government body), is the principal funder of bioscience in universities and research institutes in the UK.
Jan joined PBL in 1997 and became Managing Director in 1998. Under his management PBL has taken forward over 700 biological science innovations emerging from public research around the world. Over one third of these have been evaluated by industry for potential commercial use and several have succeeded in the precarious journey to becoming commercial products, with examples in agriculture, food and healthcare.
Prior to joining PBL, Jan spent 11 years with Zeneca plc (formerly ICI Seeds and later to become Syngenta), managing international crop breeding and biotechnology R&D programmes in maize, wheat, and other agricultural crop species He has a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge. Following a PhD in plant genetics and biochemistry at the Plant Breeding Institute in Cambridge, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen. He has over 20 peer-reviewed publications in the academic literature.
Jan has served on the board of several fledgling technology businesses, and between 2001 and 2007, he was scientific advisor to the Cambridge Gateway Fund (a venture capital fund specializing in emerging tech companies).
Jan has advised, amongst others: The Rockefeller Foundation, The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Resources), the Finnish Academy and the Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB, Gent). He also served on the Technology Transfer Advisory Board of the Danish Institute of Agricultural Sciences. He is Guest Professor at Hangzhou Normal University and Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
In 2022, he published a book about the final expedition of the explorer Ernest Shackleton The Quest Chronicle: The story of the Shackleton-Rowett Expedition. Jan’s grandfather John Quiller Rowett financed the expedition. Jan is a trustee of the ReQuest Foundation a charity helping young people engage in polar research and exploration.