Nigel Titchener-Hooker, Ph.D.

Professor and Dean of Engineering at University College London

Speaker

Nigel Titchener-Hooker directed the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Future Targeted Manufacturing Healthcare Hub from inception until 2020 when he became the Director of Strategy (2020-2024). The Hub addresses the manufacturing, business and regulatory challenges to ensure that new targeted biological medicines can be developed quickly and manufactured at a cost affordable to society. Prior to that he was the Director of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacture in Emergent Macromolecular Therapies and was the past lead of the UCL Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (IMRC) in Bioprocessing programme. Each of these major multidisciplinary activities are run in close collaboration with industry and user consortia and a national university network. The Hub itself has nearly 50 collaborators and is acknowledged as a national centre of excellence and an exemplar. A major focus of Nigel’s work is the creation of whole bioprocess models and the use of these to gain process insights and understanding. Here he worked with Dr. Yuhong Zhou in the creation of graphical user interfaces to visualise better process trade-offs. With Prof. Suzanne Farid, Nigel has pioneered studies of decisional tools addressing the interface between bioprocessing and business issues. In line with the theme of whole bioprocess modelling, Nigel has collaborated with colleagues Professor Gary Montague (University of Teesside), Professor Elaine Martin (Leeds University) and Prof Jarka Glassey (University of Newcastle) to create new ways of improving the performance of manufacturing processes by combining IMRC tools with agent-based methods.

Nigel chaired the Engineering Doctorate (EngD) in Bioprocess Leadership activity from inception to 2016. The EngD programme has attracted over 100 sponsor companies to date and more than 200 projects have been funded under this mechanism which complements the research within the Department. Funding for the above research has come from the a range of company collaborators.

Nigel has held consultancies with a broad range of international companies and serves on the editorial board of key peer-reviewed journals. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2008 in recognition of his pioneering work on biopharmaceuticals manufacturing. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) and was awarded the Donal Medal for his contributions to Biochemical Engineering in 2013. He gave the IChemE/ACS Danckwerts medal lecture in 2014 and was awarded the Dunnill Prize by the Bioprocess Industry Association in 2016. He was awarded the Queens Anniversary Prize in 2015. He was the first non-US academic to Chair the Board of the prestigious ACS-supported Recovery of Biological Products conference series.