Speakers
Rosie Rodriguez
Lydia Mapstone
Tarun Vemulkar
Panel Session
The challenges facing an entrepreneur evolve as their company does, and tackling each new stage may require new thinking and flexibility from a CEO. Join us for a look ahead at what may await you as your company scales, and to hear advice, thoughts, and suggestions for managing transition.
Rosie Rodriguez is President, Growth at Relation and a senior leader in the UK TechBio sector. With over 22 years of experience across Roche, GSK and biotech, she has shaped R&D strategy, partnerships and organisational growth at scale. She brings deep experience building high-performing interdisciplinary organisations and translating scientific excellence into impact through talent, capital and technology.
At Relation, Rosie has played a central role in scaling the company into a recognised sector leader and helping position UK innovation at the forefront of global TechBio. Her remit spans people and culture, partnerships, infrastructure, communications and external engagement, including the creation of a state of the art integrated wet and dry laboratory space in London’s Knowledge Quarter.
Rosie is deeply engaged in London’s TechBio and innovation ecosystem, spanning industry and policy, including through the BioIndustry Association (BIA), where she mentors through Women in Biotech, contributes to policy discussions and has represented the sector at Parliament Days. She is a key voice in London’s TechBio ecosystem, bringing a system-level perspective grounded in experience scaling innovative companies to cross-sector discussions with industry, investors, academia and government on what would materially increase collaboration, scale-up and long-term investment in London.
Lydia is the CEO and Co-founder of BoobyBiome, a company leveraging their expertise in breast milk research to provide solutions for improving infant gut health. As a microbiologist, Lydia is passionate about solving problems in healthcare by using biotechnology. Lydia has pursued this interest throughout her career; winning the Best Therapeutic prize at the international synthetic biology competition iGEM (2017), through her PhD research at University College London where she has published, presented and won multiple awards for her research (2017-2022) and by winning the UCL Grand Challenges award to set up the first UK infant microbiome conference at the Institute of Child Health, Great Ormond Street Hospital (2020).
During her time at BoobyBiome, Lydia was an awardee of Innovate UK’s prestigious Women in Innovation 2023 prize and has led her team to win five other awards from the BBBSRC and Innovate UK. Keen to share her expertise, Lydia became a member of the Women in Innovation Community Forum (2025-2026) to advise the UK government on funding female entrepreneurship and is a frequent guest lecturer on university courses run by Birkbeck University, UCL and Imperial.
Tarun drives the innovation of the SemaCyte® technology platform through novel material design and engineering that is embedded across Semarion’s product suite.
His background spans running microchip fabrication processes in industry to developing an advanced nanomagnetic therapy for glioblastoma.
Barbara has worked on the commercial side of life sciences for over thirty years, first in a large organisation (ICI/Zeneca/AstraZeneca), before transitioning to the entrepreneurial world of biotech.
Barbara joined the Francis Crick Institute in January 2018 as Entrepreneur-in-residence, where amongst other things, she co-founded, led and now is Chair of the KQ Labs accelerator, which is focused on start-ups from all over the UK who are making use of data/AI applied to life sciences and healthcare. She is also Chief Business Officer of Autifony, where she is responsible for strategic partnering, fundraising and commercial aspects of drug development for CNS disorders.
Barbara is a member of the investment committees of Cambridge Enterprise Ventures and of LifeArc Ventures and is also a member of Cambridge Angels. Barbara was Chair of Puridify, a UCL spin-out with a breakthrough biotherapeutics purification technology, which was acquired by GE (now Cytiva) in November 2017. Previously, Barbara was CEO of Stabilitech, and she was Commercial Director at Arrow Therapeutics until the company was acquired by AstraZeneca. Barbara was also Senior Business Development Manager at Celltech.
Barbara has a BA and D Phil in Chemistry from the University of Oxford, and is a Sloan Fellow from London Business School.