Akhilesh Goveas is the founder and CEO of SpectX, an autonomous aerial radiography inspection and asset management startup for difficult-to-access infrastructures such as offshore wind turbines.  SpectX is the first startup to enable X-ray inspections aerially using synchronized drones.

A mechanical engineer with prior work experience in automotive manufacturing, Akhilesh completed his master’s in Sustainable Energy Technologies (TU Delft), specializing in autonomous systems powered by wind energy. 

He modelled and optimized a wind-powered drinking water and electricity production system designed for developing countries with water shortages, before founding SpectX in 2021 and is currently driving the research and development at SpectX to make X-ray non-destructive testing inspections autonomous and cost-effective.

Akhilesh was the finalist for the prestigious Offshore Wind Innovator Awards, 2021 awarded by TKI Wind Op Zee for innovative contributions to the offshore energy transition. 

SpectX was also positioned among the most promising deeptech startups in Europe and was nominated for the Drapers Silicon Fall Pitch Prize, 2022. 

Akhilesh has two publications in the international scientific journal, Wind Energy Science (WES) and was recently selected for the Financial Times T500 list of top digital minds in the Netherlands, under the age of 30.

Alisha Fredriksson is the co-founder and CEO of Seabound, a London-based climate tech startup that builds carbon capture equipment for ships.

Seabound’s novel system can be installed on both existing and new ships to trap up to 95 per cent of CO2 emissions in their exhausts, providing a cost-effective solution to meeting new global regulations and reduce emissions in shipping – one of the world’s last, hard-to-abate sectors.

As a major and growing source of CO2 emissions, shipping faces considerable challenges to decarbonize. Furthermore, new global regulations from 2023 mandate emissions reductions per ship with shipowners facing challenges to comply due to a lack of available technologies.

Seabound’s equipment can reduce more than 95% of CO2 emissions from existing or new ships to future-proof them for global regulation, increase their operational lifetime, and reduce their negative impact on the planet.

To date, Fredriksson’s startup has built two working prototypes on land, signed six letters of intent with major shipowners, and secured $4.4 million in seed funding from notable investors including Lowercarbon Capital and Y Combinator.

Prior to co-founding Seabound, Fredriksson launched a climate program, a maritime electro-fuel startup, a climate activist group, a global university and a jewellery social enterprise.

Angelos Tsereklas Zafeirakis is the Managing Director of SOTIRIA; a deep-tech startup developing artificial intelligent sensing technology in the defence industry.

SOTIRIA’s domain expertise is deployed in the area of underwater intelligence and security by developing AI-as-a-Partner software solutions and designing state-of-the-art, ultra-sensitive magnetic and acoustic sensing equipment.

According to NATO, national security infrastructure – such as underwater communication cables responsible for 90 per cent of all communication between North America and Europe – remain under adversaries’ threat and over 80 per cent of our oceans remain unobserved. Navies increasingly need to accurately detect near-zero noise threats.

Developed by Zafeirakis’ SOTIRIA, Nereid is a scalable, AI-powered underwater surveillance solution for the protection of key maritime domain and national security assets. Utilising neural network architectures and fusing data from multiple sensing sources, it augments legacy systems’ capabilities and safeguards national security in the underwater domain.

Within 14 months of operations SOTIRIA has participated in NATO’s exercise REPMUS22 in Portugal at the invitation of the Portuguese Navy; engaged with five navy forces in Europe and North America; and has become European Defence Agency partners in the field of AI.

Boon Lim is the Chief Technology Officer of Oxford SimCell Limited, a spinout

company from Oxford University. His work focuses on tackling the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and he is pioneering the use of the SimCell platform to create vaccines from genome-free bacterial cells.

In his role, he leads the R&D operations of Oxford SimCell and has successfully implemented the SimCell platform in multiple bacterial species. By converting bacteria into SimCell, their surface features remain intact while they can no longer replicate due to the loss of their genome.

Boon’s innovative idea of using SimCell as a vaccine represents a new paradigm in disease control, particularly in preventing the spread of antimicrobial resistance.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is considered a ‘priority 1: critical’ pathogen by the World Health Organization, due to its lethality and high level of antibiotic resistance. Despite over 20 years of research, no novel therapeutic approach to treatment of resistant P. aeruginosa has entered the market. Lim is applying SimCell technology to develop whole-cell inactivated vaccines against P. aeruginosa.

His work and leadership at Oxford SimCell Limited have demonstrated his ability to pioneer novel technologies and provide innovative solutions to address public health challenges.

As CEO and co-founder of Amara Therapeutics, Brendan Staunton is revolutionising the treatment of pelvic health conditions by delivering digital support to patients’ smartphones, making healthcare more accessible, convenient and affordable.

Targeting unmet clinical needs in a healthcare setting, Staunton and his team are developing the first digital therapeutic platform for the treatment of Overactive Bladder (OAB), a chronic and debilitating condition that affects over 85 million people in the US and Europe alone. OAB is a complex condition with multiple symptoms, making it difficult to diagnose and treat. Behavioural therapy is the recommended first-line treatment but is notoriously difficult to access due to a lack of specialists and reliance on face-to-face care. Staunton’s app-based treatment, BladderBoss delivers accessible, convenient, and effective behavioural therapy to the patient’s smartphone enabling immediate access to care. Amara has raised over €3 million in funding and its growth plans aims to target other pelvic health conditions.

Staunton has over a decade of experience in the commercialisation of medical devices having initially studied Neuroscience at University College Dublin. He also holds an Executive MBA from Smurfit Business School and an MSc in Bio-Innovation from The University of Galway.

Bárbara Oliveira is a passionate, self-motivated founder always seeking to use the best science has to offer to solve debilitating patient needs in the world. Bárbara is a biomedical engineer by background with international research experience, having earned her MEng from the NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal, and her PhD from the University of Galway, Ireland, both in the exploration of new modalities for breast cancer diagnosis. Since then, Bárbara has continued focusing on the development of innovative medical solutions in the oncology space, ranging from idea to development, bench-testing, validation in clinical trials all the way through to commercialisation. Bárbara is a resourceful innovator with strong critical thinking skills developed by working in multi-disciplinary environments, including academia and industry alongside engineers, clinicians, and researchers. An avid communicator with a track record of delivering projects from concept to success, Bárbara is passionate about understanding the needs of patients. Her passion drives her vision to radically shift the status quo of medical device development and bring quality of life to the forefront of innovation, by giving patients access to affordable and effective devices for chemotherapy side effects.

Catherine De Wolf is an Assistant Professor of Circular Engineering for Architecture and the director of the Chair of Circular Engineering for Architecture (CEA) at ETH Zurich. Her work uses digital innovations, such as computational design algorithms and AI, to move the built environment towards a circular economy.

The building industry continues to be a growth sector but one that is actively depleting resources, generating waste and emitting greenhouse gases at a tremendous scale and speed. There is an urgent need to shift from a linear take-make-waste model to a circular model where resources are prevented from becoming waste.

The DEQO database, created by de Wolf, traces material stocks and the environmental impacts of hundreds of buildings worldwide whilst her knowledge sharing and network platform, DICE lab connects stakeholders of the digital circular economy. With these platforms she has developed a circular construction digital ecosystem for the matchmaking of people, projects, and products for fostering building material reuse.

This digital ecosystem uses AI to identify patterns of reuse in buildings and LiDAR scans buildings set for demolition to develop algorithms for designing with these available materials, and finally, digitally refabricate them.

She collaborates with bodies such as the European Commission and industry, working on large projects such as facilitating the reuse of glass from the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Dr Chang Gao is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the Department of Microelectronics, TU Delft, who has achieved significant advancements in energy efficient artificial intelligence (AI) computation without sacrificing accuracy. By reducing the energy cost of AI, Gao’s innovations have laid the groundwork for wearable and portable devices – such as smart watches, shoes, and cardiac implants – and long-term robotic prosthesis control, to provide 24/7 monitoring to improve health outcomes and patients’ quality of life.

Rather than focussing on building biologically accurate neural network models, which can lead to high production costs and less accuracy on real-world tasks, Gao applied neuromorphic principles, sparse neuron firing and connectivity to transform deep recurrent neural networks into more cost-efficient forms. He continues to bridge the gap between artificial neural networks and spiking neural networks by applying brain-inspired neuromorphic principles to massively accelerate the computation of state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures while maintaining competitive accuracy on real-world tasks.

Gao was the Best Paper Award recipient of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems; is a co-recipient of the 2020 Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering; and received the 2022 Mahowald Early Career Award for Neuromorphic Engineering. He also received the 2022 Marie-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship for his project on portable radar systems powered by energy-efficient AI accelerators.

Dominic Holmes is the CEO and Co-founder of eXRt Intelligent Healthcare a startup company focussing on accessible rehabilitation for neurological disorders, such as strokes.

Stroke is the leading cause of disability worldwide with over 76 million people living with an upper limb disability due to its affects. With an under-resourced physio workforce and unstimulating programs failing to engage patients, average rehabilitation physio times stand at two minutes a day rather than the recommended 45.

Holmes holds a PhD in Computer Science. During his research he spent significant time with healthcare professionals looking at how immersive technologies can better engage patients in their rehabilitation by providing personalised and adaptive virtual reality physiotherapy.

eXRt was founded in 2019 to commercialise his virtual reality (VR) physiotherapy platform and has seen the creation of the flagship product, ReNeuro. The VR physiotherapy game platform targets the recovery of upper limbs while remote monitoring allows physiotherapists unlimited access to patients in hospital and at home.

The platform provides elements such as virtual physio appointments, advanced movement analytics and video chats which enables 24/7 access to physiotherapy. Patients recover faster reducing the chance of a second stroke or death and the strain on healthcare resources.

Dr Fiona Freeman’s current research investigates the use of innovative engineering techniques in developing novel therapeutics to treat the paediatric bone cancer, osteosarcoma.

An Assistant Professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at University College Dublin, she has identified a novel microRNA, miR-29b gene as a potential therapeutic target for osteosarcoma. The highly aggressive bone cancer primarily affects children with over 3,000,000 children diagnosed every year.

Treatment currently involves extensive surgical intervention and chemotherapy, the same standard-of-care regimen first introduced in the late ‘seventies. Typically this results in dismal prognosis and compromised quality of life owing to poor bone regeneration and, in a substantial number of cases, limb amputation.

Dr Freeman has developed a formulation of miR-29b:nanoparticles to deliver the miRNA to the tumour site via a hyaluronic-based hydrogel delivery system and has found, following treatment, a significant decrease in tumour burden, an increase in survival, and an increase in the regeneration of the surrounding damaged bone.

These findings have the potential to revolutionise osteosarcoma treatment and improve patient outcomes by significantly reducing primary tumour mass and providing vital data that will help to inform the design of future therapies for young patients.

The technology is not limited to osteosarcoma and has the potential to treat a range of other bone cancers including bone metastases.

Dr Mike Horia Mihail Teodorescu is an Assistant Professor at University of Washington and co-founder of SurgiBox, a startup which developed a backpack-portable operating room system. SurgiBox’s mission is to reduce loss of life from lack of access to clean operating environments by bringing the OR to the patient. 

Mike’s journey started in Romania where, as a high school student in Iasi, he applied for patents in Romania and the US and was twice winner of NASA contests. 

Accepted by Harvard and Stanford universities, he obtained his BA cum laude in Computer Science from Harvard. After working at Microsoft, he returned to Harvard for his doctorate.

Mike’s research explores the process of innovation by independent entrepreneurs and machine learning fairness. He began machine learning fairness work while working as a scholar at MIT D-Lab on an international development project. 

SurgiBox received awards from MassChallenge, Harvard President’s Challenge, and HBS New Venture Competition. Long-term, Mike wishes to reduce the cost of surgical procedures and bring equality in access to surgical care. 

Beyond his entrepreneurship work, Mike teaches Data Science and Entrepreneurship at the University of Washington Information School.

Dr Walther Traberg is working to drive change for patients with life-threatening illnesses by using bioelectronic technologies to develop a novel anti-cancer drug screening platform. His approach provides unparalleled insight into cancer disease progression and has enabled the facile identification of a drug candidate that could help prevent the disease’s spread in the body.

Dr Traberg’s platform uses electronic devices which monitor cancer progression in cellular models in real-time. He has found that nanoparticles, called exosomes, secreted by tumour cells aggressively drive metastasis in healthy breast tissue. However, treating the cells with the drug heparin abrogated these malignant effects and halted disease progression. The facile collection of temporal data provided insight into this process and enabled the identification of a novel drug candidate for breast cancer that targets tumour exosomes to block metastasis initiation.

The platform could enable clinicians to test cancer therapies on cells derived from patient biopsies and select the most effective. Insights drawn from AI and genomics then propose suitable candidate drugs which are tested on the patient’s cells ex vivo. Crucially, the continuous measurement output from the platform significantly reduces the number of screening studies needed thus enabling rapid and inexpensive screening of drug candidates to tailor cancer therapies to the individual.

Driven by a passion for science, Dr Flávia Sousa is developing new biological nanotherapies for brain cancer.

A pharmacist by training, she completed a PhD in Biomedical Sciences from University of Porto, Portugal. She then embarked on postdoctoral studies at Imperial College London followed by a Marie Curie MINDED fellowship at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genova, Italy.  

As a Senior Researcher at the Adolphe Merkle Institute, her research work in the treatment of brain cancer has shown promising outcomes. Flavia has been awarded with an independent Women in Science (WINS) research fellowship by the NCCR for Bio-Inspired Materials. She has also received renowned international grants such as Fulbright, Marie-Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship and Female Science Talents.

 Her research work has been pioneering regarding encapsulation of anti-angiogenic monoclonal antibodies and understanding the efficacy in the treatment of glioblastoma.

 It has also showed that this bioengineered nanosystem was able to shuttle intratumorally and inhibit protein secretion, being an efficient alternative to deliver intracellularly monoclonal antibodies.

Dr Freideriki (Frida) Michailidou is a researcher and lecturer at ETH Zurich in Switzerland where she develops sustainable processes for creating fragrant materials by combining biotechnology with perfumery and consumer science.

Little more than 3,000 fragrance chemicals currently supply a growing multi-million dollar industry with products containing up to 300 distinct chemicals. Michailidou is advancing an eco-friendly biocatalysis technique that will allow scientists to harness renewable raw materials using less energy, shifting the paradigm towards sustainable production of high-value chemicals.

As part of her research, she led an expedition to Mount Olympus, Greece’s highest mountain, to collect volatile emissions from rare, protected plants growing at nearly 7,000 feet above sea level. Using cutting-edge analytical technology, Michailidou identified the molecular structures contributing to the unique scents of these plants. She now focuses on advancing eco-friendly biocatalysis techniques to harness renewable raw materials, to promote consumer safety while reducing the use of experimental animals.

A high demand for advanced chemical materials and a finite availability of natural resources compels the development of sustainable production technologies for high-value chemicals in fragrances. Michailidou’s research in sustainable fragrance creation has the potential to impact multiple industries including the food, pharmaceutical, agrochemical and advanced materials industries.

Dr. Gan Huang is a Group Leader at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at Imperial College London, UK. Dr. Huang is a pioneer in developing next-generation spectral-splitting hybrid solar technologies that aim to co-generate electricity and thermal energy by utilizing solar to its full potential, which direct different parts of the solar spectrum to suitable receivers. This technology has the great potential in expediting the journey towards achieving a net-zero future.

Dr. Huang’s ground-breaking work includes producing a framework, which helps designers tailor solar collectors to their intended use, and provides guidance on optimal designs, enabling efficiency limits to be identified and predicted. To commercialise this technology, Dr. Huang also designed and tested a low-cost and high-performance hybrid solar panel to Technology Readiness Level 6 (TRL6). 

Dr. Huang’s research has been recognized globally and received various awards, including the Sir William Wakeham Highly-Commended Award (2022, UK), Best Paper Award of 33rd International Conference on Efficiency, Cost, Optimization, Simulation and Environmental Impact of Energy Systems (2021, Japan), and TOP50 of Green Talents (2021, Germany). His research has been featured in 71st Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting, PV Magazines, and Imperial College London News etc.

Gerardo Portilla is an electrical mechanical engineer whose passion for innovation has led him to design a bicycle for Mars exploration and a robot that can walk in underwater environments for the exploration and cultivation of algae.

His latest innovation is a robot assistance dog for visually impaired and disabled people which guides the user in both internal and external environments using Google maps.

The robotic dog, called TEFI, has several models of artificial intelligence including object recognition which identifies traffic lights, cars and other potential hazards. The robot also contains voice recognition algorithms allowing the user to communicate directly and issue directions on specific tasks. It can also make calls and send messages to the user’s friends and family in case of emergency. 

As a quadruped robot, TEFI has stable locomotion which adapts well to all types of terrain, making it suitable for use in a range of environments.

The current cost of an assistance dog is around €35,000, not including its care and upkeep. Training and adaptation takes between 12 and 14 months for a service life of approximately seven to 10 years. With an immediate acquisition time and a cost of less than €5,000, Portilla’s innovation makes assistance care accessible to many more people globally.

Dr. Hazem Ahmed is a clinical scientist with a mission to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) and other neurodegenerative diseases. Originally a pharmacist from Egypt, Ahmed relocated to Switzerland to pursue his aspiration of studying pharmaceutical sciences and was elected to pursue his doctorate degree within the Center of Radiopharmaceutical Sciences at ETH Zurich. There, he focused on developing 18F-labelled probes to image a subtype (GluN2B) of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) in the brain using positron emission tomography (PET). In healthy individuals, GluN2B-NMDARs orchestrate higher cognitive functions such as learning and memory, whilst in patients, they play a key role in neurodegeneration. Developing a GluN2B-NMDAR PET tracer is a key challenge that puzzled researchers for over two decades worldwide. Having patented the most promising GluN2B-NMDAR PET probes, Ahmed cofounded Nemosia, a startup en route to validating the probes in patients, and unlocking breakthroughs in AD treatment. The consensus in the scientific community is that early diagnosis is key to finding a cure for AD. The PET probe can map the GluN2B-NMDAR in living humans non-invasively and promises early diagnosis of AD. Additionally, it can detect drug-receptor engagement and estimate the appropriate amount of GluN2BNMDAR drugs needed for the treatment of AD patients.

Heini Isoaho is a Co-Founder of Dermeco, a company with a patented technology offering sustainable material solutions for hydrocolloid wound dressings.

Heini studied Industrial Design in a university in Finland and after graduating she started to investigate commercial opportunities in the wound dressing market together with her former classmate.

During her research, Heini discovered that hydrocolloid dressings generate an estimated 30 million kilograms of waste annually and it takes on average 400 years for the material to decompose. The breaking-down process leaves behind half-a-million kilograms of harmful microplastics per year, posing a threat to wildlife, ecosystems and human health.

To resolve the environmental issues of the industry, Heini co-founded her startup Dermeco and together with her team developed a new innovative material that is the only biodegradable hydrocolloid dressing in the world. Dermeco’s patented technology decomposes into water, carbon dioxide and hummus and can be used for various wound care applications, such as blister and acne patches, cold sore treatments and advanced wound care dressings.

Dermeco is positioned among the most promising health tech startups in Europe and has been recognized as a finalist in the Nordic Startup Awards 2022 and IdeaRace Finland innovation competition. Dermeco recently won “The Best Startup 2022” award in Productive Idea competition organized by JCI Finland and Nasdaq, earning a billboard at New York’s Times Square.

Dr Hortense Le Ferrand has developed, published and patented several 3D printing technologies to fabricate easily-customisable and high-performance multifunctional materials. 

At present, one technology processes one type of material to make one type of object, with an urgent need for multimaterial and multifunctional devices’ digital microfabrication methods. Le Ferrand’s technologies provide a solution to this need. 

Her innovation allows an additive manufacturing technology to produce microdevices with tailored performance, such as sensors, capacitors and thermal interface materials. This allows the fabrication of a variety of multimaterial functional devices with only one technology such as a pressure microsensor with embedded cooling capability which leads to higher cycling performance. 

Another example is a thermal cooling material that extracts the heat from a source and drives it to a specific direction, which has high significance in 3D electronics. 

The technology is also able to process standard materials like reinforced polymer composites and ceramics, making the technology multimodal and adaptive.

Some of the materials created by the innovation include self-cooling mechano-sensors, strong ceramics, stiff yet morphing materials and strong, lightweight, high thermally conductive insulating composites which have applications in the advanced electronics, robotics, aerospace spheres and beyond.

The innovation represents the new technology necessary for the future of manufacturing and Industry 4.0.

Dr Jonathan C. M. Wan, MB BChir PhD, is an internationally recognised physician-scientist who has made significant contributions to the field of cancer liquid biopsy. His research focuses on developing new, more sensitive methods for detecting cancer in blood using circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA). 

Despite progress in the cancer liquid biopsy field, detecting ctDNA in patients with early-stage or residual disease remains challenging due to the very small amount of DNA released into the bloodstream. 

Wan’s innovation uses computational biology to search for combinations of mutations, or ‘mutational signatures’, to boost sensitivity.  As identifying multiple characteristic target mutations for each cancer, increases the chances of detection, the use of mutational signatures can accurately detect relapse after surgery and early-stage cancers.

This approach has delivered a ten-fold increase in sensitivity for ctDNA, unlocking the possibility of detecting early-stage and residual cancer using only a single drop of blood.

His work has resulted in multiple lead-inventor patents, which are being used in industry and translated into novel diagnostics for improved cancer care. 

Alongside his clinical practice, Wan has published first-author papers on circulating tumour DNA detection in Nature Reviews Cancer, Science Translational Medicine and Nature Communications and has published senior author papers on liquid biopsy data science in Lancet Oncology and Trends in Cancer.

Dr Matthew Murphy has developed a surgical technique which can regenerate articular cartilage with minimal scarring, an innovation which could revolutionise care for patients suffering from osteoarthritis (OA).

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic disease which results in irreversible, progressive damage to the cartilage of joints. Estimated to affect over 300 million people worldwide, the condition mostly affects the hip, knee and hand joints resulting in loss of function. 

A technique called microfracturing is currently used to improve patients’ symptoms however this leads to scarring or fibrocartilage. While fibrocartilage provides some temporary symptomatic relief, it is structurally weaker than articular cartilage resulting in progression of the disease and the eventual need for joint replacement.

Dr Murphy has discovered a population of skeletal stem cells in joints that can be activated following microfracturing. These activated stem cells can be encouraged to regenerate articular cartilage by controlling the stem cell environment or niche. The technique can be used in any articular surface of any joint affected. The ability to activate and control stem cell differentiation is key not only in diseases such as osteoarthritis but other degenerative disorders.

Dr Murphy is currently a Hunterian Professor for 2023, awarded for his contribution to surgery by the Royal College of Surgeons of England. 

Naroa Coretti is a Ph.D. student at the MIT City Science group whose work is transforming urban mobility by creating more sustainable transport modes. One of Coretti’s most notable contributions to the field of urban mobility is the MIT Autonomous Bicycle Project, which has captured global attention for its potential to revolutionize urban transportation. This shared, autonomous bicycle would operate as part of a mobility-on-demand service, offering a sustainable and convenient alternative to cars and other traditional modes of transportation in urban environments. The bicycle has a transformable rear-wheel mechanism with the bicycle configuration allowing users to ride it as a regular bike. Then, for autonomous driving, it transforms into a tricycle that has the necessary stability to drive by itself. When deployed as a fleet, users would request rides via a mobile app, an autonomous vehicle would drive to their location for pick-up, and users would ride it as a conventional bicycle to their destination. Through her research and academic contributions, Coretti has demonstrated that by adding autonomy, micro-mobility solutions could provide a service that is more efficient, convenient, and environmentally friendly. These new systems can transform urban mobility by offering a sustainable, seamless door-to-door service, reducing car dependency and fostering more thriving, vibrant, and human-centric cities.

As COO and co-founder of the Finnish cleantech startup SpinDrive, Nikita Uzhegov is passionate about making research results in energy efficiency accessible to wider society.

Using affordableactive magnetic bearings (AMBs) which he has co-invented and patented, SpinDrive is focusing on the commercialisation of the frictionless and contaminant-free magnetic bearings for various applications. Magnetic bearings are levitating rotating parts of electric motors used in industrial turbomachines which can be found in almost every factory worldwide.

About 46 per cent of the electricity globally is consumed by rotating electric motors. These motors are extremely inefficient, require extensive maintenance and are responsible for over ten per cent of CO2 emissions. Standard bearings in high-speed limit efficiency, are responsible for 70 per cent of failures and can cause oil contamination.

Uzhegov is commercializing his patents on novel affordable AMBs with IoT condition monitoring, which eliminate friction. AMBs increase electric motor-driven system efficiency by at least 10% and provide 20-year maintenance-free and oil-free operation.

He holds a doctoral degree in electrical engineering in the field of high-speed machinery. He is the US Young Transatlantic Innovation Leaders Initiative (YTILI) Fellow and received among other awards Jorma Luomi prize at International Conference on Electrical Machines.

Dr Olivia Borgue’s achievements in the Energy and Sustainability sphere are helping democratize space access by slashing the costs of running and launching satellites.

As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg, Borgue led the development, manufacturing and launch of Chipsats, the first card-size satellites with intersatellite communication capabilities. With launch and development costs of a constellation as little as €10,000, Chipsats enable ultra-low-cost space missions. 

Borgue’s design and qualification of space systems and the implementation of new technologies and mission scenarios, aims to extend space access to lower-income countries and educational establishments.

In her current role as the Technical Lead and Microgravity Systems Engineer at Yuri GmbH, Borgue leads the development of Yuri’s ScienceTaxi, a commercial microgravity test platform for biological experiments.  

Outside of work, she contributes to the ISO/TC 172 Optics and Photonics/AHG group as an expert in developing VR/AR industrial standards. She also provides research and newsletter content for the Initiative for interstellar studies (I4is) and serves as a lecturer.

Having the ability to communicate with each other makes the miniature satellites, which weigh less than 30g, more suitable for complex space operations. They are designed for short missions, and quickly burn in the atmosphere to prevent creating space debris. 

Peter Rowe is the CEO of Deep Branch, a carbon recycling biotechnology company aiming to secure the global food system by meeting demand for food and feed sustainably without compromising on nutrition or quality.

Producing protein directly from industrial emissions, the company’s proprietary gas fermentation platform, (R)evolve uses carbon dioxide and hydrogen as clean and renewable carbon and energy sources to deliver next-generation bio-based products. The single-cell protein, Proton has been developed for the animal feed industry where it is used as an environmentally friendly alternative to soy or fishmeal.

Made from locally sourced ingredients, it has a bespoke nutritional profile and is designed to tackle the climate emergency by reducing the food industry’s impact on biodiversity loss. The platform uses sustainable and scalable feedstocks and its locally produced ingredients have up to 60% smaller carbon footprints than traditional alternatives, with no arable land requirements and minimal water usage.

Passionate about the nexus of technology and business, Rowe has worked in technical and commercial biotechnology roles in the UK, Spain, and the Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Microbiology and is a certified AgTech consultant and Innovation Management expert.

Robert Hoye is an Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, co-founder of a start-up, and leader of a team of 12 people developing a new generation of semiconductors that could revolutionise sustainable energy conversion. Robert completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge (2012-2014), followed by a postdoctoral position at MIT. He returned to the University of Cambridge as a Research Fellow in 2016, before founding his group at Cambridge through the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Research Fellowship in 2018. He moved to Imperial College London in 2020 as Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, before moving to Oxford in 2022. 

Robert has discovered and patented a new class of semiconductors that can tolerate imperfections, enabling efficient performance to be achieved when manufactured cost-effectively. These defect-tolerant semiconductors include compounds containing the nontoxic element bismuth, which he has developed into photovoltaics for clean electricity production with outstanding potential. A core application is to use these devices to harvest the energy widely available from indoor lighting to sustainably power Internet of Things (IoT) electronics. IoT are key to creating a smarter future, but heavily rely on batteries. Over 100 billion batteries will need to be replaced each year when there are a trillion IoT nodes. The bismuth-based semiconductors Robert discovered have the potential to achieve >50% efficiency, and using these to power IoT devices directly, or in synergy with an energy storage device, reduces the reliance on short-lived batteries, which could unleash the potential of the IoT.

For his visionary and pioneering work, Robert has been awarded 35+ international prizes, including 2018 Young Engineer of the Year by the RAEng, and 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 – Europe. 

Roujia Wen is the co-founder and CTO of Seabound, a London-based climate tech startup that develops carbon capture equipment for ships. Seabound’s novel system can be installed on both existing and new ships to trap up to 95% of CO2 emissions, providing a cost-effective solution to meet new global regulations and reduce emissions in shipping.

Shipping is a major and growing source of CO2 emissions and, as one of the world’s last, hard-to-abate sectors, faces remarkable challenges to decarbonize. Emerging technologies such as ammonia and methanol are still 10 to 20 years away from being in sufficient supply and unlikely to benefit the existing global fleet of around 100,000 ships with lifespans of 25 to 30 years.

Furthermore, new global regulations from 2023 mandate emissions reductions per ship, with shipowners unprepared to comply due to a lack of available technologies.

The platform can future-proof ships for global regulation, increase their operational lifetime, and reduce their negative impact on the planet.

Wen’s background is in mathematics, computer science, and physical sciences, with prior R&D experience in materials, fluid dynamics, and particle physics. Before Seabound, she built machine learning products at Amazon’s Alexa AI, and completed a master’s degree in Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.

Rémi Besson is co-founder of Sonio, a company providing solutions for fetal ultrasound practitioners to improve the quality and efficiency of routine and expert exams.

Congenital anomalies affect one in 33 births in developed countries. In 50 per cent of cases, ultrasound does not identify detectable anomalies. Besson’s main innovation is focused on enhancing prenatal diagnosis through technological innovation, medical expertise and collective intelligence, adding clinical value in complex cases.

The platform relies on artificial intelligence to support clinical practitioners by exploring 3,700 possible combinations, taking into account a myriad of data: visible signs on ultrasound; medical history; risk factors; and genetic information in real-time. The AI-driven solution monitors ultrasound through 250 syndromes and 700 anomalies enabling doctors to diagnose rare fetal anomalies typically difficult to notice during screening.

Besson leads the AI team at Sonio in developing the image processing algorithms and clinical information. With his master’s degree in mathematics from Paris Saclay University and Doctorate degree from the Applied Mathematics Laboratory of Ecole Polytechnique, he teamed up with Cécile Brosset to co-found Sonio. Thus far, two patents have been filed and Sonio has been selected by the European Innovation Council accelerator, one of the most competitive accelerators in the world.

Tawfiq Nasr Allah is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Fairbrics, a start-up company whose mission is to fight climate change by developing circular manufacturing processes using renewable resources instead of fossil-based resources.

His innovation is the development of a strategy to transform CO2 into a raw material for the manufacture of fabric. Currently, polyester accounts for 60 per cent of all textiles produced globally and a third of the fashion industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. Replacing a petro-based product with a CO2-based product provides energy-intensive industries with an ecological and cost-effective solution to decreasing their carbon emissions at once, at scale.

Tawfiq’s interest in green chemistry began whilst studying at Columbia University where he became familiar with the potential uses of CO2 as a carbon source and its possible applications. During his PhD at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Paris Saclay University, Tawfiq investigated innovative ways to create highly valuable nitrogen-based compounds through the catalytic transformations of CO2, CO and Hydrogen. 

Since co-founding Fairbrics, the team has improved the technology and delivered three proofs of concept to fashion brands such as H&M, On and Aigle. Work is ongoing to diversify the platform to serve other energy intensive markets, such as sports equipment, automotives and packaging.

Manufacturing and mechanical engineer Theo Saville is CEO at CloudNC which is developing advanced software which will allow companies to create efficient and reliable manufacturing processes in a single click. 

Saville’s technology means companies who make products can now create them more efficiently, either by using the new software to accelerate their own operations, or through manufacture at the CLoudNC factory in England. 

His innovation uses cloud analytics to programme and machine high-precision engineered parts at the click of a button to help drive productivity in the sector.

Saville was exposed to CNC machining whilst working in 3D printing and realised the potential for the technology to be automated to the same degree. His proposition is an embodiment of the Industry 4.0 trend and the drive towards autonomous systems in manufacturing. 

Operating in manufacturing, one of the globe’s biggest industries, the technology has the potential to impact the lives of millions through the creation of more efficient, better produced components used in everyday objects. The opportunity also exists for this precision part production to make manufacturing accessible to a much wider demographic.

Prior to founding CloudNC, Saville worked in a number of consultancy engineering and design roles, designing numerous objects for commercial manufacture, including a compact sound diffuser and a watch.

Thomas Truong is an engineer who holds a master’s degree in the field of Artificial Intelligence from Sorbonne University. He is the inventor of an app that utilizes cutting-edge AI technology to learn and translate all sign languages into voice, text, and image with just two example videos per sign. The app makes sign language interpretation accessible and affordable for the deaf-mute community.

 Thomas’s invention is a landmark achievement as it is the first time that hardware, software and artificial intelligence are all ready for this type of solution to be used at scale. Thomas’ mechanism substantially improves the efficiency of machine learning which allows his app to recognize a given hand action with two example videos rather than the 100 previously required. 

Previous attempts to solve this problem focused on a small number of sign languages and required special equipment. Thomas’ app works with over 300 sign languages and can be used with an iPhone, iPad or Mac issued from 2018. 

The app is also highly customizable. It works with various hand types so users themselves can teach it new hand actions by providing example videos on-device. The app is named VocalSign on the Apple App Store and the company is named teachablai.com

Nanoscientist Dr Tino Matter has spearheaded the development of a wound-healing platform that not only keeps bacterial infections in check but also promotes the body’s own capacity for self-healing.

The technology addresses the growing global threat of antibiotic resistances and insufficient wound healing. Current wound healing products are severely limited in terms of robustness and bioactivity which results in millions of patients worldwide suffering complications from extended hospital stays, increasing their exposure and susceptibility to viral and bacterial infections.  Dr Matter’s innovation, which is based on metal oxide nanoparticles, addresses a vast global wound market.

Widespread academic and clinical interest in the platform has led Dr Matter to launch the startup anavo medical which has received significant traction and funding to bring the technology to patients.  The technology can be widely implemented, treating internal and external wounds, potentially saving the healthcare industry and patients billions of dollars worldwide.

While pursuing his quest to disrupt the wound care market, Dr Matter has been appointed as a Nanomedicine lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences in Bern.

Victor is a postdoctoral researcher from Madrid, Spain, devoted to understanding the human visual system for creating clinical instrumentation in optometry and ophthalmology. 

As a member of the VioBio Lab (Institute of Optics, Spanish National Research Council) in Madrid, Victor’s research focuses on understanding how the visual system perceives blur and developing clinical tools for improving diagnostics in optometry and ophthalmology. 

He is co-inventor of four patents, author of seven scientific publications and has 14 contributions to international conferences. He has also directed four master’s theses. 
His main project consists of the development of a new method using tunable lenses to evaluate the visual prescription faster and more precisely than the traditional method of identifying letters through different lenses. He has obtained funding from the CaixaResearch Validate program 2022 as Project Leader to continue with the commercial development of this technology.

As well as successfully completing several acceleration programs, Victor obtained a PhD in Biomedical Sciences and Technologies from Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M) with Cum Laude honors. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in Optics and Optometry from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).

Dr Yannis Assael is a Staff Research Scientist working on Artificial Intelligence at Google DeepMind. A graduate from the Department of Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia, Yannis completed an MSc at the University of Oxford – finishing first in his year –  and an MRes at Imperial College London, both with full scholarships.

He returned to Oxford for a DPhil degree on a Google DeepMind scholarship and, after a series of research breakthroughs and entrepreneurial activities, began working as a researcher at Google DeepMind. 

His contributions in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning range from audio-visual speech recognition to multi-agent communication and AI for culture, studying damaged ancient texts. His research, which focuses on contributing to and expanding the greater good, has attracted much media attention for example, featuring on the cover of the the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal, Nature.