About us

Gail Marcus has extensive healthcare and biotech senior leadership experience in both Fortune 100 companies, including CIGNA and United Healthcare, and small venture back companies. She was named one of the top 100 women leaders in Massachusetts while serving as CEO of a venture-backed diagnostic company. Gail has started and grown early-stage ventures in both the US and UK. She has worked across the healthcare continuum, including managed care, pharmacy benefit management, diagnostics and healthcare provision and services.

Gail currently serves on several public and private boards. In terms of public boards, she serves on the board of Natera (NTRA, Nasdaq) and served on the board of Triple S (TSM, NYSE) until the company was sold in 2022. Gail serves on venture backed early-stage companies in the US and UK. She is currently Board Chair for Biomodal a UK-based DNA sequencing tools and technologies company, where she led a $100 million Series D round as Executive Chair. Other private company boards include Cyted (Cambridge UK), as board chair, and PathAI (Boston) as lead independent director. Her committee experience includes Nominating and Governance (chair), Audit Committee (chair and member), Compensation Committee (chair and member) and Risk Management (chair). She advises start-up organizations through the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship at MIT and as an advisor to companies in the US and Australia. She has achieved the Leadership Fellow designation from the National Association of Corporate Directors and is certified as a cybersecurity expert. She is qualified as a financial expert.

Gail received her BA Summa Cum Laude at Wesleyan University (Middletown CT). After graduation, she earned a Master’s in Business Administration from Wharton and Master’s in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania. She holds a Doctor of Health Administration from the Medical University of South Carolina.

Steven is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Oxford Brain Diagnostics (OBD). As a world leading authority on the microstructure of the brain and its altered function in disease, Steven led the creation of Cortical Disarray Measurement (CDM), our unique platform technology for understanding changes in the structure of the brain, while at the University of Oxford. Before leaving the University of Oxford to create OBD, Steven held the position of Associate Professor in Clinical Neurosciences and had more than 20 years of experience researching brain pathology.

After raising seed funding in 2019 he has led the team to deliver our commercial strategy for growth and is responsible for the overall direction of the company. Steven has set a clear vision for OBD and his management team to execute.

During his academic career, Steven held several positions including College Lecturer in Neurology for Medicine at Corpus Christi College, Director of Studies for Human Sciences at Wadham College, culminating in leading his own research group as Associate Professor. In his capacity as principal investigator he won multiple external grants (including from Alzheimer’s Research UK), and was an investigator on several large international projects. He has authored over 40 publications in his respective field in addition to various book chapters, covering topics such as cellular organisation of cerebral cortex, sub-cortical nuclei and tracts, functional correlations, MRI of post-mortem brain, cerebral laterality, comparative brain evolution, and diseases including dementia, schizophrenia and autism.

Steven holds a BSc (Hons), Human Sciences, University College London and a DPhil in Neuroscience, Queen’s College, University of Oxford.

Tim has been an active investor in technology companies for over 25 years and has worked across a range of geographies, sectors and stages. He was heavily involved in establishing BGF's current early stage investment strategy and has been actively involved in sourcing and executing many of the investments within BGF portfolio as well as supporting post-investment through to exit.

Will has over 18 years-experience in both public and private investments, having started his career at Sloane Robinson LLP, and emerging market hedge fund in 2007 progressing to an assistant portfolio manager before leaving to join a single-family office in 2011, before joining Oxford Investment Consultants, manager of OTIF, as a founding member in 2015. Will has also been the managing member of Technikos LLP since 2016.

Will was a extensive experience managing the end-to-end investments and management process and private asset and university spinouts.

Will is currently on the board of Caristo Diagnostics, Sonosine Limited, and Oxford Brain Diagnostics. Having served in numerous board roles in other companies over the last 15 years. 

Andrew is Founder Director of Oxford Brain Diagnostics (OBD), having previously served as Chair from 2019 to 2024.

Andrew is an experienced chair, company director, and investor in early-stage companies. His personal portfolio includes several successful medical technology startups. Andrew is the former Chair of Brainomix Ltd and Intelligent Ultrasound Ltd (IUL), and former Director of Intelligent Ultrasound Group plc which acquired IUL in 2017.

Andrew has more than 40 years experience in high technology companies in a variety of roles. He was involved in the early stages of Internet computing in Silicon Valley and later worked to build Intel’s UK venture arm.

Andrew earned his MBA at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and holds a BSc (Hons) in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Steven D. Pearson, MD, MSc is the Founder of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), and after leading the organization for over 17 years, he now serves as a Special Advisor. ICER is an independent non-profit organization that evaluates the evidence on the value of medical tests, treatments, and delivery system innovations. Under Dr. Pearson’s leadership, ICER became widely acknowledged as the leading independent health technology assessment group in the United States. Through its assessment reports and broader work with stakeholders to translate evidence into action, ICER seeks to inform public policy and to support decisions on pricing and insurance coverage decisions that improve health care access and affordability for all Americans.

Dr. Pearson received his medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and completed internal medicine and research fellowship training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Previously, he has served as a Visiting Scientist in the Department of Bioethics at the NIH, a Special Advisor on Technology and Coverage Policy at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Vice Chair of the Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee (MedCAC). His publications include over 200 peer-reviewed articles and commentaries on the role of evidence in the health care system, and the book No Margin, No Mission: Health Care Organizations and the Quest for Ethical Excellence, published by Oxford University Press.

Steven is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Oxford Brain Diagnostics (OBD). As a world leading authority on the microstructure of the brain and its altered function in disease, Steven led the creation of Cortical Disarray Measurement (CDM), our unique platform technology for understanding changes in the structure of the brain, while at the University of Oxford. Before leaving the University of Oxford to create OBD, Steven held the position of Associate Professor in Clinical Neurosciences and had more than 20 years of experience researching brain pathology.

After raising seed funding in 2019 he has led the team to deliver our commercial strategy for growth and is responsible for the overall direction of the company. Steven has set a clear vision for OBD and his management team to execute.

During his academic career, Steven held several positions including College Lecturer in Neurology for Medicine at Corpus Christi College, Director of Studies for Human Sciences at Wadham College, culminating in leading his own research group as Associate Professor. In his capacity as principal investigator he won multiple external grants (including from Alzheimer’s Research UK), and was an investigator on several large international projects. He has authored over 40 publications in his respective field in addition to various book chapters, covering topics such as cellular organisation of cerebral cortex, sub-cortical nuclei and tracts, functional correlations, MRI of post-mortem brain, cerebral laterality, comparative brain evolution, and diseases including dementia, schizophrenia and autism.

Steven holds a BSc (Hons), Human Sciences, University College London and a DPhil in Neuroscience, Queen’s College, University of Oxford.

Mark Jenkinson is Professor of Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford, also holding a professorship at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He has extensive research experience in medical image analysis, a world-leading expert on human brain imaging using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), machine learning and statistical analysis.

At the University of Oxford he leads the structural image analysis group in the FMRIB Centre (since 2003). Mark has a strong track record of developing world-leading image analysis methodology and is a co-founder and the principal developer of the FSL software package, which is the most widely used software package covering the analysis of structural, diffusion and functional MR images of the brain, being used in over 2000 laboratories worldwide. He has been an investigator in major UK and international projects, with total awards over $100 million, including the largest and most cutting-edge multimodal neuroimaging datasets ever assembled – the UK Biobank and the NIH Human Connectome Project. He has over 200 publications with more than 35,000 citations in the last 5 years (and with over 55,000 lifetime citations). He is an invited member of international standardisation committees (INCF Human Atlas Working Group and the NIH Data Format Working Group), co-editor and author of a series of textbooks on neuroimaging analysis, and has been recognized for his work in neuroimaging research by numerous awards, including a David Phillips Fellowship and being listed as a global highly cited researcher for six years.

Ged is the Chief Scientific Officer of Oxford Brain Diagnostics. He has been engaged in medical imaging research and development since 2005, in both academic and commercial settings.

Prior to joining OBD in January 2021, Ged was the Head of Imaging Sciences at Perspectum – an Oxford spin-out applying quantitative MRI to liver diseases. Ged made pivotal technical contributions to two products which received FDA 510(k) clearance: MRCP+, for modelling and quantifying biliary anatomy and disease; and Hepatica, which united Perspectum’s flagship LiverMultiScan technology with volumetric modelling of liver anatomy for applications including surgical planning. Ged had the privilege of taking over from his mentor Professor Sir Michael Brady FRS to lead an outstanding team of imaging scientists whose work was at the core of Perspectum’s innovations.

During his academic career, Ged has co-authored around 80 journal articles, accumulating more than 10,000 citations. His PhD at UCL was supervised initially by Professor Derek Hill, who left to lead Ixico, then by Professor Sebastien Ourselin, with clinical supervision and mentorship throughout from Professor Nick Fox at the Dementia Research Centre. Ged carried out postdoctoral research at the DRC, and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (the “FIL”), before moving to the Oxford Centre for Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB) with a research fellowship. 

Ged holds an MA, MEng from University of Cambridge and a PhD from University College London (UCL). 

Ian is the Chief Technology Officer of Oxford Brain Diagnostics.  Ian is spearheading OBDs technology strategy towards cloud automation, designing and building scalable products that address some of the key challenges drug developers and clinicians currently face in Dementia and other Neurological disorders.

Prior to joining OBD, Ian was a highly accomplished entrepreneur, technology designer and systems architect. He was co-founder and CEO of Mode 7 Ltd, an Oxford-based technology and games developer and publisher.  Mode 7 disrupted the online gaming space with their hugely popular "simultaneous turn-based" paradigm, headlined by PC Gamer's Strategy Game of the Year 2011 Frozen Synapse.  They also provided CMS systems used on over 70 television shows on BBC, ITV, Sky, and others, as well as working in the physical interaction space, partnering with Novint Technologies on their motorised input device known as The Falcon.

Terry is the Chief Operations Officer of Oxford Brain Diagnostics (OBD), also responsible for planning around Finance, Quality & Regulatory, and HR. He was part of the team that worked together for 2 years to create OBD and secure seed funding.

Prior to OBD, Terry worked internationally with colleagues from the University of Oxford to support research organisations in their mission to commercialise disruptive new technologies, providing practical hands-on support to young high-tech start-ups to define a business case and raise funding. Whilst based in Singapore and Malaysia, Terry was able to combine a hectic schedule with opportunities to pursue his passions for travel and photography.

Terry returned to the UK in 2015, settling down in the idyllic town of Royal Leamington Spa. A short train journey to Oxford, he immediately started his search for an opportunity to join a team working to create a new venture with the potential to have a global impact for good.

Whilst searching, Terry mentored young innovators through the Royal Academy of Engineering Leaders in Innovation Fellowship programme and worked with Oxford-based med-tech companies to raise funding and protect their intellectual property. Terry delivered several consulting projects with the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), allowing him to gain a detailed knowledge of the research infrastructure across the NHS.

Terry holds an MSci in Physics from the University of Bristol and an MBA from Imperial College London Business School. Now working as part of the ambitious and integrated team at OBD, he can combine the latest thinking in business management with the physics mindset of asking lots of questions, taking full advantage of the opportunity to work with our science teams to advance his knowledge of MRI physics and neuroscience.

Omar is the Chief Commercial Officer of Oxford Brain Diagnostics (OBD). He has supported and serviced the pharmaceutical, healthcare and technology sector for over two decades in numerous roles that were transformative.

Prior to joining OBD, Omar held senior executive positions with IQVIA, Ipsos and LOGICACMG. At Ipsos Healthcare he was responsible for the Top 20 Global Accounts Programme along with driving business in Emerging Markets. At IQVIA, he supported and serviced the global pharmaceutical industry for over fifteen years in numerous sales, marketing and general management roles with a focus on commercial effectiveness solutions in emerging geographies to addressing key incentive and performance issues affecting the industry. Prior to that, Omar also worked as a Business Consultant at LOGICACMG. He specialised in wireless technologies, their applications to various business models in Automotive, Healthcare and Defence markets.  His experience exposed him to large Telecom operators like Vodafone, BT Wholesale and T-Mobile.

Omar is client focussed, driven, and passionate about making a difference in Dementia and Neurological disorders. He has excelled in complex large contract value sales, business development, consulting and technology solutions internationally. He thrives on building high performance teams, implementing change and developing talent and expertise to sustain businesses for the long term.

Omar holds a BA (Hons), Business Studies, University of East London, and an MBA from Bayes Business School, London specialising in Strategic Management of Technology.

Mario is a Senior Scientist at Oxford Brain Diagnostics. He is responsible for carrying out scientific  research at the basis of our cortical architecture model and neuroimaging method to support the client projects and the global growth of OBD. He provides measurable performance and quality insights by modeling complex problems understanding cortical dysfunction in Dementias and other neurological conditions. Mario uses cutting-edge approaches to improve understanding of the brain changes behind the earliest stages of neurodegeneration, ageing and other neurological diseases. His different training, skills and experiences, provide a rich source of inspiration for generating new ideas and research questions to improve the scientific background of CDM^® biomarker. 

During his academic career, Mario worked for many years as a Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Research Neuropsychologist with patients suffering from a wide range of psychiatric and neurological disorders. He spent four years at the Neuroimaging Laboratory of Santa Lucia Foundation in Rome, studying the micro and macrostructural brain changes underlying cognitive dysfunctions and behavioural symptoms in Dementia. Mario joined the lab of Neuropathology at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford. He worked for four years with the Dr Steven Chance (CEO & Co-Founder) and Professor Mark Jenkinson (CO-Founder) on developing CDM technology, combining histological, clinical, cognitive behavioural and MRI data (in-vivo and ex-vivo).

Mario holds a BSc in Clinical Psychology, MSc (Hons) in Neuropsychology, University of Palermo. He has a PhD in Neuropsychology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome.

Pegah works at Oxford Brain Diagnostics as a Senior Neuroimaging Scientist. She is a biomedical engineer with over fifteen years of experience, specializing in computational neuroimaging, epilepsy, artificial intelligence, and neurodegenerative disease research. Throughout her career, she has worked on a range of projects, some of which have involved processing neuroimaging recordings from modalities such as fMRI, MRI, and S/i/M/EEG. Her area of expertise include the design, optimization, and implementation of pre- and post-processing pipelines for a variety of MRI sequences. She conducted several training sessions on data analysis. Her experience includes designing, optimizing, and harmonizing MRI protocol.

Prior to joining OBD, Pegah was a research fellow at the Neurodegeneration Imaging Group (NIG) and conducted data analysis on different studies including PD and MIND-MAPS ALS with the focus on DTI, rs-fMRI and structural MRI sequences. She has worked as a research fellow at UCL-CMIC on the application of machine learning on task-fMRI from 2021 for a year. She was also involved in a tractography project at UCL-Queen Square as a research fellow in 2020.

Pegah has a BSc, MSc, and PhD in Biomedical Engineering.

Helena is the Vice President of Sales at Oxford Brain Diagnostics (OBD). She is a business development expert in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry. Most recently, she has held positions at private venture backed life science technology companies; Unlearn.AI and Imeka Inc. She was responsible for driving business by creating large partnerships with the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry in both positions. Prior to this, Helena was a business development expert at Eurofins Scientific, a large publicly traded contract research testing organization in the regulatory industry. 

Helena completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, at the Harvard Medical School, in Boston. She worked on small molecule inhibitors for the treatment of leukemia, and published a first author paper on this work. These small molecules are currently in  clinical trials for the treatment of various cancers. Helena holds a Ph.D. in Pharmacology and Toxicology from the University of Toronto, and a B.S.c., in Biomedical Sciences from the University of Waterloo. 

Helena has a combination of a strong scientific background with strong business acumen. Helena is deeply passionate about leveraging her scientific background to establish and develop partnerships to help push science forward in the hopes of finding cures for neurological diseases.

Roy is a Senior software engineer at OBD, where he contributes to the development and maintenance of the CDM product and assists in optimising scan processing pipelines to better serve clients and facilitate clinical evidence generation. His passion lies in crafting medical devices that directly impact and improve patients' lives. 

Roy's journey is grounded in his background in computer vision and deep learning. Prior to OBD, he worked on computational pathology at Perspectum for three years where he honed his skills in software development, image processing, and cloud computing. His master’s thesis, supervised by Prof. Anil Bharath, explored the innovative concept of generating synthetic MRI data for pre-training deep learning models. 

In his pursuit of growth, Roy actively seeks out learning opportunities, often turning to online courses to expand his skill set. Currently, he is diving into Rust programming, particularly focusing on web app development during his spare time. 

He earned his MEng in Biomedical Engineering from Imperial College London in 2020. 

Jamie is a Junior Software Engineer and Data Scientist. He has a passion for where neuroscience and technology meet and has a background in smartphone healthcare applications.

At OBD, he works within the technology team, developing new ideas, analysing, and processing new project data and supporting the science team in analysis and new investigations.

Prior to joining OBD, Jamie worked at a start-up focussing on smartphone healthcare applications, working within the research and development team whose goal it was to measure and monitor various metrics about the user such as blood sugar levels and many aspects of cardiovascular health. His academic background includes medical engineering with a neurotechnology focus, with dissertations on brain segmentation in new-borns and the flow of solutes in the brain vessel network known as the glymphatic system.

Jamie holds a BEng (Hons) in Medical Engineering from Cardiff University and a MSc in Biomedical Engineering (Neurotechnology) from Imperial College London.

Jeffrey Cummings, MD, ScD, is the Joy Chambers-Grundy Professor of Brain Science, Director of the Chambers-Gundy Center for Transformative Neuroscience, Co-Director of the Pam Quirk Brain Health and Biomarker Laboratory, Department of Brain Health, School of Integrated Health Sciences, University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). 

Dr. Cummings is globally recognized for his contributions to Alzheimer’s research, drug development, and clinical trials.  He has been recognized for his research and leadership contributions in the field of Alzheimer’s disease through many awards including the Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Award of the national Alzheimer’s Association (2008), Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology (2017), Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Association of Geriatric Psychiatry (2010), Bengt Winblad Lifetime Achievement Award from the national Alzheimer’s Association (2019), and the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation’s Melvin R. Goodes Prize. He was featured in the Gentleman’s Quarterly (June 2009) as a “Rock Star of Science™.” 

Dr. Cummings completed Neurology residency and a Fellowship in Behavioral Neurology at Boston University, followed by a Research Fellowship in Neuropathology and Neuropsychiatry at the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, Queen Square, London. Dr. Cummings was formerly Director of the Mary S. Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research at UCLA, and Director of the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health. Dr. Cummings’ interests embrace clinical trials, developing new therapies for brain diseases, and the interface of neuroscience and society.  He has authored or edited 43 books and published over 800 peer-reviewed papers. 

Dr Lynne Hughes is an international neurology clinical trial research expert and brings with her 35 years of experience in the global clinical research field. Previously, Lynne was Vice President and Global Head, Medical Strategy, Neurology at IQVIA. In her 22 years at IQVIA, Lynne worked exclusively in neurology and managed global development programs both from the operational perspective as a program director and also from the design perspective – working with clients to develop evidence-based strategies for the most efficient conduct of clinical development plans. She provided consultancy advice in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease, pain indications, multiple sclerosis, acute care including TBI and stroke, migraine and epilepsy and a range of neuro-orphan indications.

Lynne has a particular interest in neurocognitive assessment and design of appropriate studies to assess AD & neurocognitive dysfunction and is a member of many steering and / or executive committees. Lynne is a current member of the NIA-NIH task force for recruitment into AD trials and development of the US National Framework and is co-chair of the DAVOS (DAC) taskforce for expediting clinical AD trials, sponsored by WEF & CEOi. She is also a member of the G7 & G20 World Dementia Councils.

Steven D. Pearson, MD, MSc is the Founder of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), and after leading the organization for over 17 years, he now serves as a Special Advisor. ICER is an independent non-profit organization that evaluates the evidence on the value of medical tests, treatments, and delivery system innovations. Under Dr. Pearson’s leadership, ICER became widely acknowledged as the leading independent health technology assessment group in the United States. Through its assessment reports and broader work with stakeholders to translate evidence into action, ICER seeks to inform public policy and to support decisions on pricing and insurance coverage decisions that improve health care access and affordability for all Americans.

Dr. Pearson received his medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and completed internal medicine and research fellowship training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Previously, he has served as a Visiting Scientist in the Department of Bioethics at the NIH, a Special Advisor on Technology and Coverage Policy at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Vice Chair of the Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee (MedCAC). His publications include over 200 peer-reviewed articles and commentaries on the role of evidence in the health care system, and the book No Margin, No Mission: Health Care Organizations and the Quest for Ethical Excellence, published by Oxford University Press.