As Chief Executive of HIRANI, the life and Health sciences cluster, Joann connects and accelerates collaborative health innovation from the lab-clinic-patient-home. She provides strategic insights and forums to link knowledge with opportunities and promote investment to drive health and prosperity for the citizens and businesses of Northern Ireland, the health services and the wider, global health and life sciences economy. The life sciences cluster was successful in Oct 2023 in securing a £7.5M Innovate-UK place-based Launchpad investment for local SME R&D growth.
Joann started her career as a cellular pharmacologist and industry fellow at Imperial college developing novel therapies for COPD and delivering clinical biomarker rationale for 4 novel therapeutics to accelerate progression to the clinic. In 2011, Joann started her own company act as an honest-broker to facilitate industry-academic-clinical partnerships delivering the £16M US-UK Pfizer Rare Diseases Consortium, and in 2018 as Chief of Staff at Merck (MSD) UK R&D Laboratories, to realise the start-up vision for the new collaborative £1.3B UK R&D Innovation laboratories for Neurodegeneration at The Francis Crick Institute, in London.
She also holds advisory positions at TopMD, Discovery Park, and the British Pharmacological Society. Joann graduated in 2020 from Imperial College with an Executive MBA from Imperial College, London winning the Dean’s award and Joan Woodward Prize for Organisational Strategy. She is also visiting Professor at Ulster University
Wednesday Dec 6, 2023 , 4:00 PM - 4:45 PM
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