The Team

Technical:

Professor Anton Middelberg

BE (Hons) Adel, PhD Adel, MA Camb. CPEng, CEng(UK), FIChemE, FTSE

Professor Middelberg is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and the Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at The University of Queensland, Australia. His research focuses on the science of chemical self-assembly processing, with the ultimate aim of defining new functional products and new process routes for the manufacture of existing products. He is particularly interested in products that comprise ordered biomolecules, with current research foci in the area of Pepfactant®-stabilised emulsions and foams, and self-assembling viral vaccines.

Professor Middelberg has previously held tenured academic positions at Adelaide and Cambridge Universities, a Fulbright fellowship at Berkeley, and was elected Fellow of Selwyn College Cambridge and Fellow of the Cambridge-MIT Institute. He has received a number of awards including the Brodie and Shedden-Uhde medals of the Institution of Engineers Australia, has published more than 150 refereed papers at the interface between biology and engineering, and has editorial roles on journals including Chemical Engineering Science (Executive Editor), Trends in Biotechnology (Advisory Editorial Board Member) and Biochemical Engineering Journal (Associate Editor).

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Dr Annette Dexter

BSc(Hons) UQ, MS UIUC, PhD UIUC

Annette completed a B.Sc. with Honours in biochemistry at the University of Queensland. She was awarded the Maude Walker Prize in Science in 1984 and 1985, and the Edward Taylor Prize in Chemistry in 1985 as part of her undergraduate studies. She earned her M.S and Ph.D at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 1996, where she received a University of Illinois Fellowship and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Predoctoral Fellowship and was awarded the Anne A. Johnson Work Award for her doctoral thesis. After completing her doctorate, Annette proceeded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for postdoctoral work with Tony Sinskey on whole-cell biocatalysis.

Annette returned to the University of Queensland in 2004, where she coinvented the Pepfactants technology with Professor Anton Middelberg. She is now working on further development and application of Pepfactants, with emphasis on the development of new peptide designs.

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Management:

Anthony Girgis

B. Ec, MBA, FCPA, FCIS, FTIA, MAICD

Anthony is a highly experienced senior Executive with a broad Finance and Operations background gained across a number of industries including Chemicals, Automotive, Engineering and Plastics.  He has held many executive management and board positions including CEO of Huntsman Surface Sciences UK Limited and Chairman of Group for Organic Surfactants & Intermediate Products Council (GOSIP) in the UK.

Anthony brings a wealth of Australian and International manufacturing experience and strong track record of improving profitability and cash flows in highly competitive and dynamic environments including turnarounds.  Anthony has experience in sourcing, negotiating and deploying new technologies to grow market share and/or improving cost competitiveness.

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Dr Judy Halliday

Bsc (Hons), PhD, AAICD

Judy is the Life Science Commercialisation Manager at UniQuest Pty Ltd. She has over seventeen years experience in drug discovery and development. This includes more than six years in the senior management team of listed Australian Biotech company Alchemia Ltd. Judy was the Head of Preclinical Development and Clinical Development manager at Alchemia Limited. She was part of the management team involved in all aspects of company operational activities as Alchemia transitioned from a privately held, venture capital funded entity into an ASX listed company via an IPO. At Alchemia Judy's primary responsibility was the management of oncology and ophthalmology projects, from preclinical development through early clinical development.

Prior to joining Alchemia Judy was a group leader at the Institute for Molecular Biosciences, UQ. She has been successful in applying for competitive peer reviewed grant funding, has peer reviewed scientific publications and is an inventor on a number of patents.

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Board:

Richard Marshall

Richard Marshall is Chairman of the Board of Pepfactants, and an investment manager at the pre-seed investment fund, Uniseed.

He has 20 years industry experience in Australia, UK, China and the US, and has worked in venture capital, investment banking and software startups. Richard has been with Goldman Sachs, BP, Deutsche Bank and Constellation Brands but most recently has worked with early-stage companies in the UK and Australia. Richard holds a Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Applied Science from QUT, and an MBA (Distinction) from Oxford University.

 

Dr Mark Radford

Mark Radford has extensive consulting and leadership experience in both the academic and commercial worlds. Prior to joining Symbiosis, Mark was Professor of Behavioural Science at Hokkaido University in Japan.

Mark has a Bachelors degree with Honours and a PhD from Flinders University of South Australia. Mark received a Monbusho Scholarship from the Japanese Ministry of Education enabling him to complete a Doctor of Medical Science from Nagasaki University School of Medicine, Japan. He is a Fellow of both the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Australian Institute of Management.

In addition to his research and academic career, Mark has significant commercial experience. He was Director (Asia-Pacific) for an international consulting firm based in Singapore providing consulting advice to Fortune 500 companies around the world. In 1998, Mark set up his own business, Miko Associates, providing management and organisational consulting services to both private and public organisations.

Mark has been involved as either author or co-author of over 45 papers, chapters and books in the areas of medicine, management, leadership, decision making, and cross cultural behaviour.

 

Dr Dean Moss

Bsc (Hons), MPhil, PhD

Dean brings a wealth of international life science knowledge and experience to UniQuest, the major commercialisation company of The University of Queensland, as Group Manager, Life Sciences.

He has more than 20 years experience in science, universities, business, management and commercialisation in Australia, USA and UK. Dean has been Managing Director or a senior business development executive in several health and biotech companies worldwide, including Binax, Agen Biomedical, Launch Diagnostics, Amrad ICT, Amrad Biotech, United Drug and most recently his own start-up business in the UK, York Medical Technologies.

Prior to moving into the commercial world, Dean was a principal scientist at Agen Biomedical. He has also worked as an NH&MRC research scientist in Brisbane at the Princess Alexandra Hospital, the Royal Brisbane Hospital and the Queensland Institute of Medical Research. Dean has a PhD in Medicine from The University of Queensland.

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© 2007 Pepfactants Pty Ltd