Team new page - Magnitude Biosciences

Our team of life science experts

Dr Fozia Saleem

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.

Prof David Weinkove

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 a 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.

Dr Chris Saunter

CTO

With a deep mathematical understanding, Chris is the genius behind the software at the heart of the Healthspan Machine. He has over 15 years experience adapting imaging technology to answer questions in biology and is an Associate Professor at Durham University Physics Department.

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.

Dr Sally Waterman

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.

Sara Allan

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.

Dr Sushmita Maitra

Senior Research Scientist

Sushmita Maitra has many years of experience in molecular biology and in using animal models such as Drosophila and C. elegans with research experience in India, United States and the United Kingdom. She helped in setting up making C elegans transgenics at Durham University and using the worm as a bioprocessing tool to make a protein with therapeutic potential. Sushmita has a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and gained 7 years experience as a postdoctoral researcher at Durham University. Her many years of experience in different labs has given her a keen eye for ensuring that studies are run to the highest standards.

Dr Frederique Gill

Commercial Innovation Manager

Frederique has a PhD in Cell Biology and many years experience working in the life sciences CRO environment. She brings substantial Business Development skills to Magnitude Biosciences and has extensive experience working with life science, health products and manufacturing companies of all different sizes across a wide range of research areas, helping to understand and address different research problems. Her scientific background, breadth and depth of biological sciences knowledge, and rich commercial experience enable her to understand client challenges and help to find innovative solutions to address them. She is proactive, well-organised, and a great communicator, always ensuring our clients have a positive experience with Magnitude

Jessica Evans

Business Development Manager

Jess has experience of both lab research and business development, she brings these combined skills to her role on the busdev team at Magnitude. She investigated whole organism ageing using Drosophila as a model in her final year of her MBiol degree at Durham University. Alongside her university studies, Jess co-founded a bespoke furniture company, with customers across the UK and Europe. She took the lead on customer care, marketing, and day-to-day operations. Her focus was on listening carefully to customer needs and adapting to their challenges, often going to great lengths to meet their requirements. Her combined scientific and business background ensures a seamless transition for our clients from the first meeting to final project delivery, developing the research partnership with attention to great communication and responsive action.

Guillermo Calvo Navarrete

Business Development Manager

Guille gained research experience applying C. elegans to complex industrial processes whilst completing his Master’s in Industrial biotechnology at Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville). He brings this expertise to his business development role at Magnitude Biosciences. Customer’s needs are always his top priority and his scientific background ensures he provides each customer with a positive experience tailored to their specific challenges. Guille is an excellent communicator, often speaking to our customers in one of the several languages he is fluent in (English, Spanish, Italian), and always willing to do what’s required to establish productive and long-lasting working relationships

Matthew Bell

Program Manager

Matt is a dynamic and accomplished Program Manager with a passion for innovation. With a Master of Chemistry from Newcastle University, Matt's journey began as a Research Scientist, honing his expertise in various roles at speciality chemical and sustainable industrial technologies companies. Leveraging his extensive industry experience, he thrived as a Programme Manager at a global CDMO, excelling in project management to help clients across the biopharmaceutical industry. Matt's in-depth knowledge of science and technology, combined with his natural understanding of our clients individual needs, means he has a proven track record of delivering results to the highest standards.

Adelaide Raimundo

Research Scientist

Adelaide has over a decade of experience of working with the nematode C. elegans. She has previously organised a manual lifespan screen of a 1000 E. coli strains, using 100 worms on each strain (Virk et al 2016). Her attention to detail and worm picking skills are of the highest level, meaning that your worm strains and experiments are in good hands. Adelaide holds a BsC Nutrition from Kings College as well as a Masters in Molecular Biology.

Gunta Edwards

Research Scientist

Gunta began her scientific journey in Sweden, where she obtained a Master’s degree in Molecular Biotechnology from Uppsala University. After which, she gained industry experience from working in life science production within a start-up company. Gunta started working with C. elegans as a postgraduate researcher at Yale University in the US, where she did live confocal microscopy of fluorescent worm strains with RNAi microinjections, alongside her role as a lab manager. Her industrious attitude and research expertise ensures our customer projects are completed in an organised and timely manner, to the highest standards. Gunta also takes the lead on our transgenics projects to generate novel worm strains tailored to our customer's research questions.

Dr Andy Kirby

Lead Development Engineer

Andy has over 20 years experience creating imaging technologies for a range of uses, from microscopy to astronomy. Alongside Chris, Andy helps to design and create our automated imaging technology which enables the production of rich and reliable data. With a breadth and depth of engineering experience, Andy brings a unique set of practical engineering skills which means our technologies are kept at the cutting edge. Andy has decades of experience matching his engineering skills with the needs of research life scientists, for repeatability, consistency, authenticity of the data, and ensuring objectivity of all of our experiments.

Dr Philip Jackson

Research Software Engineer

With a background in computer vision, machine learning and software engineering, Phil is a core member of our tech team constantly working to scale up and implement innovative solutions to our data analysis pipeline by automating labour intensive bottlenecks. In addition he is upgrading and extending our current software infrastructure to be robust, future-proof, automated and well documented. Before coming to Magnitude, he worked on neural network interpretability and dataset management web services, and has several publications on convolutional neural networks. Phil holds a BsC in Physics and Computer Science, an MSc in Computer Vision and a PhD in Machine Learning from Durham University.

Emma Turnbull

Laboratory Technician

Emma is a key support member in our lab and to the wider Magnitude team. Having worked in both start-up and commercial laboratories ranging from agricultural biotechnology to medical haematology, Emma possesses a wealth of knowledge and skills that help lab operations run smoothly on a day-to-day basis. Emma has a BSc in Bioveterinary Science achieved at the University of Lincoln. Her impressive organisational skills and passion for science means that alongside her work at Magnitude she is also completing a PhD in Bioveterinary Science, with a focus on bioinformatics, phylogenetics and canine parvovirus viral evolution.

Dr Michael Fasseas

Senior Transgenics Consultant

Michael Fasseas has 12 years' experience working with C. elegans including many years making transgenic worms and in setting up and running different types of C. elegans studies to the highest scientific standards. Before joining Magnitude, he set up his own transgenics services specialist company, and is highly accustomed to adapting to customer needs and helping customers achieve the results they need to address their research question. As as our senior consultant, Michael oversees all transgenics experiments, ensures everything works and is scheduled well, and also helps to ensure we maintain the flexibility to adapt and add to studies when required. Michael is an excellent listener and goes above and beyond to help customers, and consistently receives customer feedback that he acts as an invaluable member of their research team. He holds a PhD in Agricultural Biotechnology from the Agricultural University of Athens.

We are supported by an Advisory Board of top experts in their field.

Gordon Lithgow

Advisory Board

Gordon is one of the foremost scientists in the Biology of Ageing. He led the identification of pharmacological interventions in aging, prompting many efforts to find compounds that extend lifespan in different animal models. His lab is based at the world-leading Buck Institute for Research on Ageing, of which he also is a vice-president. Gordon serves on many advisory panels, including the National Institute on Aging’s Board of Scientific Councillors and the Chair of Biological Sciences at the Gerontology Society of America. His academic work relies on advanced technologies and industrial partnering to identify disease-relevant compounds that suppress age-related and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Liping Zhao

Advisory Board

Liping is a pioneer in the study of host-microbiome interactions. By applying metagenomics-metabolomics integrated tools and dietary intervention, his lab understands and manipulates gut microbiota to improve human metabolic health and alleviate metabolic diseases such as type 2 Diabetes. He discovered that an endotoxin-producing opportunistic pathogen isolated from an obese human gut could induce obesity in germfree mice. He is both as Chair of Applied Microbiology at Rutgers University and Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and he serves as editor of Microbiology and Microbiome, society fellow and is an advisory board member of several organisations, such as the ISME Journal, the journal Microbiome, the American Academy of Microbiology, CIFAR and AGA.

Rozalyn Anderson

Advisory Board

Rozalyn has dedicated her career to elucidating the effect of caloric restriction and metabolism on ageing. Her work explores metabolic status and loss of metabolic integrity as critical factors contributing to increased disease vulnerability as a function of age, and she has revealed the interplay between lifespan and metabolism via the NAD+ pathway. She is currently Associate Professor, Division of Geriatrics and Gerontology, Department of Medicine, UW School of Medicine and Public Health, Associate Director of Research, Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center, William S. Middleton Memorial Veterans Hospital Madison. Rozalyn leads the Metabolism of Aging research program at the UW Madison SMPH Department of Medicine. She is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and both Fellow and current President of the American Aging Association.

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