Board

Duncan Tatton-Brown

Duncan has an extensive career on the board of many high growth international technology companies. Most recently he served as the CFO of Ocado Group plc for eight years, where he remains a senior adviser. Duncan currently sits on the board of New York Stock Exchange listed company, Cazoo Group and on the board of Trainline plc, where he serves as Chair of the Audit Committee. He also chairs the online travel agent, Loveholidays.

He has prevoiusly been CFO for other companies including Kingfisher plc, Fitness First plc and Virgin Entertainment Group. He earned a master's degree in Engineering from King's College, Cambridge in 1987. He currently serves as a trustee on the board of the Orange Tree Theatre.

John O'Higgins

John O’Higgins was previously CEO of Spectris, the international productivity-enhancing instrumentation and controls company, where he led rapid global growth and evolution of the company as it pursued multiple market applications from a broad technology platform.

John holds several non-executive roles including at the global science and chemicals company Johnson Matthey plc, whose solutions are designed to enable cleaner air, improved health and the more efficient use of natural resources. He also served as a non-executive Director of Exide Technologies, the US-based supplier of battery technology to automotive and industrial users.

John is also a Member of the Corporate Advisory Board of Great Ormond Street Hospital Charity in the UK.

Dr Guy Harmelin

Dr Guy Harmelin has extensive experience in healthcare and technology investment and entrepreneurship. Guy was previously on the leadership team at Harel Insurance Investments and Financial Services, the largest insurance group in Israel with over $71 billion in assets under management. Guy has invested and worked with multiple successful companies including Lemonade, Innoviz, American Well, Ecoppia, Ayala Pharma, Biond Biologics, Tabit, Assured Allies, Quantum Machines, Rafael and Ein-Tal Hospitals.

Prior to joining Harel, Guy was the Co-Founder and CEO of RondinX, a computational drug target discovery Company which merged with BiomX and went public on NYSE in November 2019, PHGE.

Guy has an MD Summa Cum Laude from the University of Florence and served as a Resident Physician at the Tel Aviv Medical Center.

Wendy Becker

Wendy Becker is an experienced international, public company Board director. She is currently Chair of the global technology business Logitech International SA, a Non-executive Director of Sony Corporation and a member of the Council of the University of Oxford. She previously served on a number of boards including NHS England and Cancer Research UK. In her successful executive career, she held a number of general management, digital and marketing, and strategy roles.

Wendy was CEO of Jack Wills, the British-based clothing manufacturer and retailer as well as Global CMO of Vodafone, the Managing Director of TalkTalk, and a partner at McKinsey & Company.

Adrian Hennah

Adrian is a highly regarded business leader with nearly 20 years’ leadership experience at a number of FTSE 100 companies. His background encompasses a breadth of sectors including healthcare, technology, FMCG and engineering.

Adrian was Chief Financial Officer at Reckitt Benckiser for seven years and held the same role at both Smith & Nephew and Invensys. He spent 18 years at GlaxoSmithKline, holding a number of senior management and financial positions. Adrian began his career at PwC, working in both audit and consultancy, and Stadtsparkasse Koeln, the German regional bank. Adrian currently serves on the Board of Sainsbury’s, where he is a member of the Audit and Nomination Committees, and Oxford University Press.

Dr Gordon Sanghera

Gordon Sanghera is co-founder of Oxford Nanopore with Spike Willcocks and Hagan Bayley. He was appointed CEO in May 2005 and has led the company through multiple finance rounds, and in 2021, a listing on the London Stock Exchange. The company has developed a new generation of nanopore-based sensing technology. The first products enable the real-time, high-performance, accessible and scalable analysis of DNA and RNA, and this new class of sensing has the potential to expand into proteomics and metabolomics.

Fully bespoke manufacturing capability has been built from the ground up, integrating state of the art electronics with silicon fab technology combining the chemistry and biology. The company has been commercially distributing sequencing platforms since 2015, including the handheld and portable MinION and Flongle, and the high-throughput benchtop devices, GridION and PromethION. These platforms are used in more than 100 countries to understand the biology of humans and diseases such as cancer, plants, animals, bacteria, viruses and whole environments.

Dr Sanghera’s PhD in bioelectronic technology was followed by a career at MediSense — an Oxford spin-out that delivered a new generation glucose technology to the market — where he held positions including VP World Wide Marketing, Research Director and Manufacturing Process Development Director. During this time, he was instrumental in the launch of several generations of blood glucose bio-electronic systems for the consumer and hospital medical markets.

Nick Keher

Nick is an experienced life sciences CFO, having previously served as CFO of Clinigen Group and Benevolent AI. Prior to his CFO roles he gained extensive experience in the life sciences industry serving as Managing Director and Head of the European healthcare equity research team at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and before that held roles at Investec and GSK after switching from practising pharmacy. Nick comes to the role with significant experience of financial leadership of complex, scientific businesses, and has a deep understanding of capital markets. Nick has responsibility for the Group’s finance function and investor relations.

Dr Spike Willcocks

After studying Chemistry at the University of Oxford and completing a DPhil in Biochemistry, Spike started working for the intellectual property investment business “IP Group” in 2001 as an early employee.

He ultimately led its Life Sciences group, and was responsible for the formation of Oxford Nanopore Technologies during that time. Gordon persuaded Spike to join Oxford Nanopore full time at the start of 2006, leading the Corporate and Business development function, and now he is the company’s Chief Strategy Officer.

Tim Cowper

A Chartered Accountant and operations specialist, Tim was interim Finance Director at Oxford Nanopore for several months in 2009, handing over a stable and well documented finance infrastructure. He then joined Oxford Nanopore as Commercial Operations Director in 2012.

In his first five years at the company Tim was responsible for setting up and managing operations and infrastructure across the company, including leading on operations for our first product launch – the MinION Access Programme – in 2015.

As part of his Operations role, Tim selected and implemented our Enterprise Resource Planning system which has remained robust and fit for purpose throughout the company's rapid growth and development.

Tim was appointed as VP-Finance in 2017 and continues to ensure that Oxford Nanopore’s values of agility and entrepreneurialism are reflected in our corporate governance, risk control and business processes, to maximise business efficiency.

Having qualified as an accountant at Ernst & Young, Tim became Financial Controller of Celltech Group plc where he was a key member of the IPO team and managed several transactions of the Listed company. He went on to co-found Sterilox and ran the finance function before joining Clipper Ventures plc as Finance Director. Tim has also been Finance Director at British Biotech plc (Vernalis plc) as well as managing a portfolio of biotech and technology companies, including the AIM-listed Bioventix plc, before joining Oxford Nanopore.

Kate Priestman

Kate Priestman has extensive experience as a biopharma executive, serving in leadership roles across commercial, operations, corporate strategy, communications and government affairs. She is currently Chief Corporate and External Affairs Officer on the management team of global biopharma CSL, and was previously Senior Vice President of R&D Strategy, Portfolio and Operations at GSK. Kate also served on GSK’s separation board, delivering the successful spin-out of Haleon plc in 2022.

In addition, Kate has held global and UK commercial leadership roles at Eli Lilly & Co and Zeneca, after an early career at the BBC, where she spent several years as a broadcaster. Kate also currently serves as a Trustee of RBG Kew, a science organisation working globally to understand plant biology and fight biodiversity loss.

Dr. Sarah Fortune

Dr. Sarah Fortune is a distinguished Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Sarah holds a Doctor of Medicine from Columbia University and extensive expertise in genomic diagnostics and multi-omics approaches to infectious disease, including at the intersection of human genetics.

Her world-leading research has focused on understanding how Tuberculosis (TB) mutates to become drug resistant using a combination of single cell, genetic, and genomic approaches, including nanopore sequencing. In 2019, she led one of three labs awarded funding by the US National Institutes of Health to establish a new centre for immunology research to accelerate progress in TB vaccine development – work that remains ongoing. Oxford Nanopore will draw on Sarah’s rich experience as the company seeks to develop more sequencing-based applications in the clinical space, including its first sequencing-based test for drug-resistant TB.

Dr Heather Preston

Dr. Heather Preston is a seasoned healthcare professional with over 30 years of experience as a scientist, physician, McKinsey management consultant, and longtime investor in biotech and life sciences. She most recently served as a Partner and Managing Director of TPG Biotech based in San Francisco and brings a strategic perspective to support the Oxford Nanopore's scaling efforts.

Heather currently sits on the Boards of Oxford Biomedica plc and Oxford Science Enterprises plc and was previously sat on the Board of Fusion Pharmaceuticals Inc. Heather holds a medical degree from the University of Oxford and a BS in biochemistry from St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical School at the University of London.