Ian Underwood is an award-winning researcher, innovator, and entrepreneur – Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Society for Information Display.

Ian co-founded MicroEmissive Displays (MED) in 1998, PureLIFI in 2012, and has supported the formation and growth of many more start-up/spin-out companies, raising investment of £45M+ along the way. Incidentally, as MED’s Product Development Director in 2003, he was responsible for the ME1602 that was judged “the smallest colour tv screen in the world” (Guinness Book of World Records, 2004).

Ian’s initial research interests in visual displays and photonics have expanded technologically into micro/nano sensors across a range of applications, in particular health technology, and generically towards broader and deeper inter-disciplinary research solutions to societal challenges. He was a co-investigator on the £5.2M Implantable Microsystems for Personal Anti-Cancer Therapy (IMPACT) programme grant, College lead in securing £20M from Legal and General plc in 2020 to create the Advanced Care Research Centre (ACRC), and, in 2025, became Director of MicroTex.

He is a pioneer of inter-disciplinary doctoral training, initially as Assistant Director of the £5.0M EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Integrative Sensing and Measurement (2014–22) and now as Director of the £5.5M pan-disciplinary ACRC Academy within the ACRC. He also mentors at the Enterprise Hub of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Kev has a passion for developing new technologies for healthcare impact and driving commercialisation.

As Co-Director of the Baillie Gifford Pandemic Science Hub, Kev leads the development of therapies and technologies for infections and inflammation. He has been the Chief Investigator on multiple first-in-human trials and collaborates across disciplines, including engineering, chemistry, physics, and informatics. He is a board Director of Codebase, the UK’s largest tech incubator and delivers the TechScaler programme for creating, developing, and scaling tech startups.

Robert is interested in the applications of light in areas such as clinical photonics, laser manufacturing and advanced optical instrumentation.

Specific current interests include the development of fibre-optic technologies for the minimally invasive imaging of tissues with unprecedented resolution, light-based therapies for treating infection and resecting tissues with extreme precision, and photonic approaches to interrogating tissues in a label free manner with the aim of guiding clinical decisions.

He is the academic co-lead for the Global Research Institute in Health and care Technologies at Heriot Watt and the Principal Investigator of the £6M “U-Care” Programme Grant, which was funded as part of the EPSRC “Transformative Healthcare Technologies for 2050 call”.

Robert collaborates closely with industry, and co-founded Optoscribe Ltd which was acquired by Intel in 2022. 

In 2024, Robert was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering for his pioneering work on ultrafast-laser-based techniques to fabricate 3D waveguide devices.

Outside of work, Robert enjoys walking, reading, and spending time with the family and friends.

Tim’s research interests focus on understanding light propagation in optical fibres. 

Tim is best known for pioneering research on photonic crystal fibres, with a current focus on fibres with hollow cores. He has also made key contributions to the development of photonic devices based on tapered fibres, including the photonic lantern. His research is driven by curiosity, and also by applications in telecommunication, astronomical instrumentation and healthcare technology. He is inventor or co-inventor of 25 granted US and European patents, was elected Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2007, and was jointly awarded the 2018 Rank Prize for Optoelectronics.

Tim is the MicroTex Hub’s Theme Lead on Optical Fibre Technology, and he manages its research activities at the University of Bath.