Nurturing an emergent, chemistry-based business – experience from the sharp end

Alexander Hewitt

Anaphite Ltd

Alexander Hewitt is COO and Co-founder at Anaphite Ltd and A Physicist Commercialising Graphene in Li-ion Batteries.

Dr Jason Camp

Circa Group Pty Ltd

Dr Jason E. Camp became CTO of Circa Group in January 2020. He received his BS degree in Biochemistry from the University of California, Davis, in 2000. Afterwards he studied Organic Chemistry at the Colorado State University and earned his PhD from Penn State University in 2007. Before joining Circa Group, he had several engagements as researcher and lecturer, and he is a committee member of SCI’s Fine Chemicals Group as well as secretary of the SCI’s Science and Enterprise Group.

Dr Tiffany Wood

Dyneval Ltd and Senior Knowledge Transfer Fellow, University of Edinburgh.

Dr Tiffany Wood is a physicist who began her research career manipulating liquid crystalline droplets with focussed beams called ‘optical tweezers’. After her PhD studies at the University of Manchester, Tiffany moved to the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol for a postdoctoral role studying dynamics within colloidal glasses. A delightfully warm and sunny spell at a conference in Edinburgh persuaded her to move to the University of Edinburgh to join the Soft Matter and Biological Physics research group where she discovered a new type of gel formed on creating defect lines within nematic liquid crystals, published in the journal Science.

In 2012, she set up the Edinburgh Complex Fluids Partnership with Professor Wilson Poon to help companies in the formulation sector benefit from the group’s research findings through contract and collaborative research. Quietly inspired by the entrepreneurs she met, Tiffany co-founded Dyneval Ltd in April 2020 to commercialise an innovative technology for precise measurement of semen quality using portable equipment, invented by her co-founder and colleague Dr Vincent Martinez. Liquid crystals, colloids, formulations and semen are all examples of complex fluids! These days Tiffany spends a considerable amount of time in cold barns assessing bull fertility with veterinarians and is enjoying the lessons of enterprise.