INVITATION ONLY
This interactive session offers a valuable opportunity to hear directly from senior leaders across UKRI, EPSRC and Innovate UK about their strategic priorities, the evolving funding landscape, and future direction for UK research and innovation.
The town hall is designed to be interactive. This is an opportunity for the engineering communities who will be directly impacted by changes to the UKRI funding structure to ask questions about funding strategy, priorities, and the interface between research, innovation and industry. Attendees will be able to submit questions for consideration in advance as well as live during the session.
Joining details will be shared ahead of the event, along with instructions for submitting questions in advance.
Recording notice
Please note this event will be recorded and published on the Royal Academy of Engineering website. Your video will be off and your account will be muted throughout the entire event. Only the speakers and presentations will be visible on your screen.
Accessibility
It is very important to the Royal Academy of Engineering that our events are accessible to all. If you have any accessibility requirements, please contact Arizona Rodriguez at your earliest convenience so that necessary arrangements can be made.
Diversity monitoring form
The Academy is committed to equity, diversity and inclusion and one of our goals is to develop an engineering community fit for the future. To help us achieve this, we would like to collect some basic anonymous data about the event attendees. If you would like to help, please complete the diversity monitoring form by logging into your user account on our website and completing ‘Update my D&I data’.
Sir John Lazar CBE FREng
President of the Royal Academy of Engineering. Sir John serves as Chair of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which empowers young people through computing and digital technologies. He is also a co-founder, General Partner, and a Limited Partner at Enza Capital, which supports tech-driven solutions to major challenges in Africa. He serves on several African tech company boards, and was previously Chair of What3words.
Professor Sir Ian Chapman
Professor Sir Ian Chapman is the Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). He was a member of the UKRI Board from February 2024 until February 2025, when he was announced as the incoming UKRI Chief Executive and became an observer on the board. Ian rejoined the UKRI Board as UKRI CEO on 20 August 2025.
Before joining UKRI Ian was Chief Executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority. It leads the world in fusion research with a wide range of programmes covering plasma science, robotics, materials testing and development, and tritium science. He has held several international roles in fusion, including chairing the International Atomic Energy Agency International Fusion Research Committee.
He was made a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2013, became a visiting Professor at Durham University in 2015 and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2022. In 2023, he was knighted in the King’s New Year Honours, made an Honorary Fellow of the Nuclear Institute and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Professor Charlotte Deane MBE
Professor Charlotte Deane MBE is Executive Chair at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). She is Professor of Structural Bioinformatics in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford and co-director of the Systems Approaches to Biomedical Research Centre for Doctoral Training, which she founded in 2009.
From 2022 to 2023 she was Chief AI Officer at Exscientia and has held numerous senior roles at the University of Oxford, including Head of the Department of Statistics and Deputy Head of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences division. She was the Deputy Executive Chair of EPSRC from 2019 to 2021.
She served on SAGE, the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and acted as UK Research and Innovation’s COVID-19 Response Director. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to COVID-19 research.
At Oxford, she leads the Oxford Protein Informatics Group, working on diverse problems across immunoinformatics, protein structure and small molecule drug discovery.
Her work focuses on the development of novel algorithms, tools and databases that are openly available to the community. These tools are widely used web resources and are also part of several pharmaceutical drug discovery pipelines.
She is on several advisory boards and has consulted extensively with industry. She has set up a consulting arm within her own research group as a way of promoting industrial interaction and the use of the group’s software tools.
Tom Adeyoola
Tom Adeyoola is Executive Chair of Innovate UK. He also sits on the board of Channel 4 and leading independent school St. Paul’s.
Tom is a Cambridge alumnus, experienced entrepreneur, and board director with over 25 years in the startup ecosystem.
He previously:
- grew his fashion technology startup Metail (based in Cambridge and London) to exit raising £25 million
- as a non executive director, took women’s personal wellness scale-up Elvie from inception to Series B
- took net zero strategy consultancy Verco through 3x revenue to acquisition
He has also been actively involved in investing and policy, co-authoring the ‘Start-Up, Scale-Up’ review for Rt Hon Rachel Reeves MP in opposition, co-founding Extend Ventures and sitting on the Creative Industries Taskforce and Startup Coalition board.