Mark Gilligan

Started an advanced electric motorbike company to develop and manufacture exciting engineering art by way of motorcycles :)

Having been involved in the acquisition of Grant Instruments I have joined the board of directors to be involved in setting the future direction of the business.

New company focussed on Protein Characterisation to take forward the products developed by the old company Fluidic Analytics Ltd.

• Oversee strategic direction and operations for Blacksheep Sciences, a leader in life science tools consulting. • Collaborate with global clients to develop and manufacture innovative microfluidics products. • Revitalize struggling companies by implementing tailored consulting solutions, resulting in improved market performance.

Building capability in Vietnam around advanced R&D and manufacturing. I have a role as a principle engineer to guide and mentor the team as well as strategically working with the management team to set longer term goals and help work out how to achieve them.

Work with the Biomedical Engineering department to advise how to fit best as a partner with industry

Really exciting team using microfluidics across biology with deep track record of innovation and leading the way. It is a remarkable time in which different fields of development have converged for our business leading to surprising applications as wide ranging as FACS sorting of gel encapsulated cells, single cell genomics as well as drug discovery of large molecule therapies and vaccines encapsulated in lipid nanoparticles!

A journey of exploring how to best use microfluidics and nanoparticles with extreme monodispersity leading to cutting edge lipid nanoparticle tools catalysed by Covid-19.

As the Syrris Group continued to grow, we needed a way to continue to drive completely business initiatives forwards, without distracting the core Syrris activty. We also wanted a way for the different parts of the business to be able to exploit the benefits of being part of a larger group. We have now restructured the group and renamed the overall company to Blacktrace Holdings Ltd. The group is now structured so that the underlying theme of all that we do is "Productising Science". The Blacktrace Group includes two kinds of businesses. Firstly Brands, which are the core drivers of product development, global marketing, operations, manufacturing and support. One of these Brands is Syrris itself, and another is Dolomite, with more to come. The second type of businesses are sales subsidiaries, which are regionally based with both our own businesses as well as distributor partners. The group has direct presence in the UK, US, Japan, India, and Brazil. My day to day role is to startup new businesses and initiatives as well as help new initiatives begin working in their early stages. This involves many kinds of new ventures, fund raising and partnership discussions.

Created the team initially as a consulting business spun out of our flow chemistry innovations to help businesses utilise microfluidics in an extremely wide range of applications. Which led to creation of a form of modular tools akin to “Lego” components. This in turn resulted in some extremely specialised skills and products in glass micro fabrication and microfluidic droplet formation that have gone on to be applied to things ranging from deep sea exploration to space exploration as well as food manufacturing and drug delivery!