Paul Ashley

Paul has an undergraduate degree in Zoology and research experience in neuro-physiology and behaviour. Paul’s PhD and post-doc roles investigated mood disorders and pain. Moving away from the bench, Paul became the CEO of a small technology company, commercialising remote monitoring and biotelemetry technology developed at the Defence Science Technology Laboratory UK. Following this, Paul took up a role at AstraZeneca as a member of the management team at the company’s environmental risk assessment facility. Paul joined Oxford University Innovation in July 2011 and oversees a team of life science Technology Transfer Managers commercialising over 1000 technologies across the breadth of the life sciences, licensing and creating companies in fields including biotech and drug discovery,  medical devices, diagnostics, genomics and digital health. Paul’s team works to identify, protect, de-risk and commercialise the intellectual property created at the University of Oxford, ranked number one university in the world for three years running (Times Higher Education Global Rankings). Since it opened its doors in 1987, OUI has created over 180 companies. Over a third of these have been created in the past three years. Oxford University spinout companies have collectively raised over £2bn since 2011. Over a half billion of this has been since the start of 2017. Paul has worked directly on notable successes during this time including the creation of NightStar Therapeutics, recently acquired by Biogen for $877m.