Agenda
17:00 – 17:30 Arrival
17:30 – 19:00 Panel discussion
19:00 – 20:00 Networking
Join us for the next Imperial Founders Forum, hosted by the Commercialisation team, Enterprise, and Professor Jonathan Jeffers (Associate Dean for Enterprise, Faculty of Engineering).
This in-person session will feature special contributions from:
- Susannah Clarke (CEO, Embody Orthopaedic)
- Yan Zhao (CTO, Breathe Batteries)
- Stefanos Zafeiriou (Founder, Cogitat, Safe Intelligence, Emphatic, Facesoft, and Ariel AI)
- Tanel Ozdemir (Investment Director Albion VC)
The Forum is open to all academic staff, particularly those active or curious about commercialisation and increasing the non-academic impact of their work. It’s an opportunity to share entrepreneurial knowledge, network, and build connections.
The theme for this session is The importance of the Team on the Commercialisation Journey.
More about the Imperial Founders Forum
The Forum aims to develop a vibrant community of entrepreneurs and academics engaged in impact beyond academe. This informal grouping is open to all academic staff, particularly those who are either active or curious about commercialisation and/or increasing the non-academic impact of their work. The intention is to create a self-supporting community of academic entrepreneurs able to provide, guidance, advice, experience, contacts and support to each other.
Business leaders and Imperial academics will be invited to come together over a series of forum sessions to share knowledge in entrepreneurship, engage in networking and create connections.
Panel Speakers
Susannah is a design engineer specialising in medical devices. Together with Prof. Justin Cobb, and with funding from the Royal Academy of Engineering, she established Embody, an orthopaedic company in July 2012 based at the MSK Lab. Embody’s initial focus was custom instrumentation for orthopaedic surgeries, using 3D printing. Since 2014 Embody’s focus has been the H1 Hip Resurfacing: an cementless all-ceramic hip resurfacing implant. R&D began in 2014, first in man was in 2017 under a Clinical Investigation, CE Mark was awarded in 2024. H1 is scheduled for commercial launch with our distribution partner, Zimmer Biomet, in Q1 2026. Susannah is the managing director of Embody, which remains a lean company of six very valuable people.
Yan moved from China to the UK for secondary education where he saw the urgent need to transition from engines to battery powered vehicles. He began research focusing on lithium-ion battery design, thermal management, and simulation at Imperial College London, where he graduated in 2019 with a PhD in battery engineering. He has over 10 published papers and has created software for cell design that is now used internationally. Observing pollution and emissions while waiting for London buses with his now 6-year-old daughter, Hannah, Yan was motivated to co-found Breathe that same year.
Breathe is more than a battery performance company, it provides a software toolchain for batteries that helps the world’s most iconic electric vehicle and consumer electronics brands do more with the power they have. The company’s simulation and embedded software products encompass the full battery development lifecycle to enable the design, validation and optimisation of better batteries.
Stefanos is a Professor in Machine Learning and Computer Vision with the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and a holder of the prestigious UKRI Turing AI World-Leading Research Fellowship. Previously, he was an EPSRC Early Career Research Fellow (2019-2024) and held a Junior Research Fellowship from Imperial College London (2011). He also served as a Distinguishing Research Fellow with the University of Oulu, Finland, under the Finnish Distinguished Professor Programme (2016-2020).
He has co-authored over 250 papers in top-tier machine learning and computer vision venues, including IEEE T-PAMI and IJCV, as well as at leading conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, and ICML. His research focuses on machine learning models applied to computer vision and biosignal analysis. His work has garnered more than 43,000 citations, resulting in an h-index of 86. In recognition of his work, he has received Imperial College’s President’s Medal for Excellence in Research Supervision (2016) and the President’s Medal for Excellence in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2022). His students are frequent recipients of highly competitive fellowships, such as the Google Fellowship (x2), the Intel Fellowship, and the Qualcomm Fellowship (x4).
He has served as an (Guest) Associate Editor for premier journals like IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI), International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. He has guest-edited more than eight journal special issues and co-organized over 25 workshops and challenges at top conferences. He also served as the General Chair for BMVC 2017.
In addition to his academic work, he is a serial entrepreneur. He co-founded six startups, such as Facesoft, Ariel AI, and Cogitat, three of which have been successfully exited. He has also served in senior industry roles, including Chief Scientist and Lead at major companies such as Google, where he led large-scale digital human and Generative AI projects.
Tanel is an Investment Director at AlbionVC and for the last 8 years has been working on the UCL Technology Fund where he has been supporting academics looking to translate their innovative life science research into category leading companies. Tanel joined AlbionVC after completing his own PhD and postdoctoral research at UCL, which focused on developing synthetic biological tools for microbiome engineering.