Non-Executive Director

Derek is an accomplished C-suite executive with more than 25 years of leadership experience in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. He has a strong track record in commercial strategy, scaling global teams, and driving sustainable, value-creating growth. Derek has held board-level roles across multiple global CROs, including Gentronix, Tissue Solutions, and Histologix. He has led the commercial strategy for multiple acquisitions and post-merger integrations, and has played a key role in several high-growth build-and-exit journeys.

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CEO

Fozia’s role within Magnitude is to lead and deliver the strategy and vision for growth of the business.

Fozia is passionate about delivering profitable innovations by effectively leading multifunctional teams. Along with the experts at Magnitude, she is committed to delivering a bespoke service to our clients tailored to answering their specific research questions. Fozia joined us with over 14 years senior leadership experience across the medical device, pharmaceutical and nicotine industries. She has extensive experience of working in the global life sciences sector in R&D, CRO and GTM environments.

Fozia has a PhD in molecular physiology from the University of Edinburgh and started her career in industry at GlaxoSmithKline. She subsequently worked for British American Tobacco and Nicoventures Holdings, where she had a wide range of responsibilities, including product development, project delivery, and revenue growth. She also held senior leadership roles at Broughton Life Sciences, where she led the creation of a new Product Development Services function and was instrumental in Broughton’s transition to a global scientific consultancy.

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CSO

David’s role within Magnitude is as our lead consultant to diagnose customer challenges, determine where our expertise and services can best progress customer research aims, and ensure projects deliver.

David is well respected in the academic fields of C. elegans and ageing biology. As a postdoc, he worked with David Gems, Ronald Plasterk and Erik Jorgensen. He is now Professor at the Department of Biosciences, Durham University and Chair of the British Society for Research on Ageing. David has over 3000 citations of his work.

David is passionate about applying the strength of C. elegans research to industrial application and he cofounded the Magnitude Biosciences team to bring reliable automated technology together with experienced C. elegans scientists to bring increases in productivity to the whole field.

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CTO

With a deep mathematical understanding, Chris is the genius behind the software at the heart of the WormGazer™.

Chris is an instrumentation specialist and is constantly thinking about how we can solve customers' problems in the lab. Chris’ daily challenges include finding new ways to adapt our hardware and software for continuous improvement to improve reproducibility of experiments and the quality of the science that we deliver. Chris’ extensive experience of finding solutions for biological labs enables him to create the technology to quantify your research question.

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Non-Executive Director & Chair of the Board

Sally has operational, strategic and board level experience gained over more than 30 years as a senior executive in multiple early stage biopharmaceutical companies and service providers. She has developed and led drug development programmes for a wide range of product types and indications and interacted with regulatory agencies in Europe and the US. Sally has been involved in developing and implementing strategies for growth which have included building sales and the team in a contract research organisation and identification and participation in multiple M&A transactions and two IPOs.

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Head of Operations

Sara oversees the operational needs of the business and joined Magnitude with over a decade of continuous improvement, quality, production and health and safety experience. Sara has a BSc in Biology and has worked in a variety of industries including medical devices, FMCG and animal feed where she had been responsible for a number of sites. Sara’s commitment to operational excellence alongside her ‘anything is possible’ attitude and scientific background makes her a perfect fit to help support our CEO with the development and implementation of our business objectives and company vision.

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