Professor of Life Science Innovation, Michael Lewis joins Birmingham with an extensive background in life sciences and digital innovation in healthcare.
I still work with five different life science and digital companies and chair funding panels for Innovate UK and the Small Business Research Initiatives scheme (SBRI) across the UK, with a real emphasis on data driven, digital healthcare. My role at the University is a bonus role.
This is like ‘Back to the Future’ but without the fancy DeLorean car, as I am a Birmingham alumni. Working with lots of private equity, venture capital and grant bodies, I saw that there was a real opportunity to bring an industrial point of view to the great science here at Birmingham and help us deliver more innovation commercially, and to benefit society overall.
Bags of energy and enthusiasm as well as 30 years working in healthcare and life science running multi-billion turnover companies all around the world. I like to share what I have learned and also learn myself.
I would like us to have the ability to find more innovations to commercialise, take concepts from idea to reality, gain a greater share of grant funding, double or treble the number of spinouts we create, test more innovative brilliant ideas in real world settings like Birmingham Health Partners.
In one company we built a digital innovation to improve cancer screening, saving one woman's life per week. The human impact of that is immeasurable.
My three dogs start barking at 6.00am wanting a walk so I don't have a choice, but if the dogs weren't there, I would get up enthused with that today might just be the day when we discover something new and transformative.