Chas Bountra is Pro Vice-Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Oxford. He is Professor of Translational Medicine in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine and Associate Member of the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford. He is also a Visiting Professor in Neuroscience and Mental Health at Imperial College, London. Chas is an invited expert on several government and charitable research funding bodies, and an advisor for many academic, biotech and pharma drug discovery programmes.
He trained at King’s College London and the University of Edinburgh before taking up a post-doctoral fellowship and college lectureship in Physiology at Oxford. Prior to returning to Oxford, he worked for 19 years in the pharmaceutical industry, where he was involved in the development of candidate drugs for several diseases, including novel treatments for cancer chemotherapy and IBS. In 2018, he was awarded the “Order of the British Empire” in the New Years Honours list.
“The world has recently witnessed what academics in this university can do when they work with industry, government, regulators, funders, NHS and many other external stakeholders. Hopefully the pandemic is now behind us. Unfortunately the ‘climate emergency’ will potentially destroy even more lives, make parts of the world uninhabitable, and is likely to produce irreversible changes to our surroundings. This conference provides an insight into how the Oxford ecosystem is once again pulling together, to take on the biggest challenge facing our planet. I hope once again, that we can create hope and solutions for humanity.”
