Keynote Speakers

Dr Patel is a Lecturer in Cell and Gene Therapy at Imperial College London.

The Patel group draws on expertise in stem cell differentiation, materials synthesis and pharmaceutical chemistry to develop biomaterials that facilitate gene transfer to desired cell populations, engineer mRNA transcripts for controlled protein pharmacokinetics and application of RNA therapies in chronic disease.

Dr Patel joined the department in 2018 after completing 4 years of postdoctoral training as an EPSRC eterm fellow in the laboratories of Professors Daniel Anderson and Robert Langer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. Here, she developed biodegradable, non-viral vectors for the inhaled delivery of mRNA to the lung.

She graduated with a first class honours degree in Pharmacy from King's College London in 2006 and remains a member of the General Pharmaceutical Council and Royal Pharmaceutical Society. In 2014, she was awarded her PhD by the University of Nottingham as part of the Doctoral Training Centre in Regenerative Medicine where she developed biomaterials that modulate human pluripotent stem cell and cardiomyocyte behaviour, under the guidance of Professors Chris Denning, Morgan Alexander and Martyn Davies.

Professor Liam Grover is a Professor in Biomaterials Science and the Director of the Healthcare Technologies Institute at the University of Birmingham.

Professor Grover is a materials scientist by training, and completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham before moving to McGill University (Montreal) to work as a CIHR skeletal health scholar. He returned to Birmingham in 2006 to establish a research group within the School of Chemical Engineering.

He has published widely on the development of new materials to replace the function of tissues (more than 180 papers) and has filed more than ten patents to protect technologies that range from osteogenic cements through to scar reducing dressings. He has given well over 50 invited talks outside the UK. Since starting his career, he has moved three technologies from concept through to clinical trial.

Since returning to Birmingham, he has raised over £30m to fund his research on the development and translation of novel medical technologies (EPSRC, MRC, BBSRC, ERDF, EU, NC3Rs, NSFC – China, NIHR, RCDM, and industry) and is the Founder-Director of the Healthcare Technologies Institute, which works to help move novel technologies through the translational pipeline. He sits on the EPSRC Healthcare Technologies SAT, the NIHR i4i panel and has sat on the MRC DPFS panel.

He was the youngest Professor in the history of the University of Birmingham (32) and the youngest ever Fellow of the Institute of Materials (30).