Occuity has more than doubled the size of its team with the appointment of new staff in key positions including, programme management, engineering, marketing and finance.
Occuity, which is developing products to screen for, diagnose and monitor major chronic health conditions including diabetes and Alzheimer’s Disease, recently closed a successful round of funding working with the Angel Investment Network. Having raised over £1.1 million, we have moved quickly to utilise this investment to grow our team and accelerate our research and development activity.
Commenting on the growth of the team, founder and CEO Dr. Dan Daly explained: “Occuity’s mission is to revolutionise disease detection and monitoring by making it non-contacting and pain free. We’re excited to have attracted a group of highly capable new members to the team, each of whom has a great deal of experience within their chosen field and will play an important role in helping us achieve our objectives.
Joining as programme manager, Derek Bean MBA, will take responsibility for project management and the delivery of the Occuity’s first product – a non-contacting optical pachymeter – as well as progressing the company’s glucose monitor project. With more than 22 years of international experience Derek, has a successful track record of taking projects from concept to commercialisation, primarily in the medical device and ophthalmic industries.
Occuity’s design and development team has also been boosted by the appointment of six new mechanical and systems engineers. New Senior Development Engineer, Lesley Parry-Jones PhD, joins from Osler Diagnostics. With a PhD in Liquid Crystal Displays, Lesley was awarded a Dorothy Hodgkin fellowship from the Royal Society. Jade Smith, MSc in Biomedical Engineering, also joins as Development Engineer and will focus on the production design and testing of the Occuity pachymeter product.
Piotr Laszczak, PhD in Biomedical Engineering, is an experienced quality systems and medical device software engineer, has been appointed Senior Embedded Engineer and will concentrate on embedded firmware code in Occuity devices and ensuring compliance with medical device regulations and ISO13485. Magdalena Kowalska, MSc in Biomedical, Biomechanics and Bioelectronics Engineering, will also be working on the device firmware as an Embedded Software Engineer.
Ex Apple and Dyson engineer, James Serjeant MEng, joins as Mechanical Engineer focused on production design for the Occuity Pachymeter.
Rounding off the list of new appointments are Digital Marketing Manager, Richard Kadri-Langford, CIM, who will be responsible for developing and implementing the company’s digital marketing and brand awareness strategies, and Leigh Wooley, FCMA, who has supported 11 fundraising events and 3 successful exits, joins as CFO.
Dr. Daly continued, “By taking the opportunity to invest in our team, we continue to enhance and build upon the excellent R&D activity we have delivered so far.”
With the excellent new team in place, the development of both the Occuity Pachymeter, our first product, and the non-invasive glucose meter have accelerated and led to an additional 5 new patents being drafted.