Clive G. Brown CTO

Clive is Chief Technology Officer at Oxford Nanopore.  On the Executive team, he is responsible for all of the Company’s Development activities.  Clive leads the specification and design of the Company’s nanopore based sequencing and protein sensing platforms with a strong focus on scientific excellence and successful commercialisation.

Clive joined Oxford Nanopore Technologies from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (Cambridge, UK) where he played a key role in the adoption and exploitation of 'next generation' DNA sequencing platforms. This involved helping to set up the world’s largest single installation of Illumina Genome Analyzers in a production sequencing environment. This culminated in the submission of many hundreds of gigabases of high quality data to the 1,000 genomes project; the largest single contribution.

From early 2003 he was Director of Computational Biology & IT at Solexa Ltd, where he was integral to the development of the Genome Analyzer (GA).  Early work demonstrated the feasibility of short reads for human resequencing and also other new applications.  This work helped to set platform performance targets and shape marketing strategy. Clive's team built Solexa's high-performance computing infrastructure and supported all of the breakthrough science behind the GA's development including major sequencing milestones.  The group also provided the software tools, core algorithms, data and relationship building that enabled subsequent early product adoption by the world’s top laboratories. Solexa was sold to Illumina for $650M in early 2007 after the successful placement and adoption of 12 instruments. These same software tools and analysis methods have enabled increases in the scale and scope of application of that technology through broad adoption.
 
Clive has held various management and consulting positions at GlaxoWellcome, Oxford Glycosciences and other EU- and US-based organisations.  He has worked at the interface between computing and science, ranging from genetics to proteomics. He has also been responsible for several successful commercial data products and holds degrees in Genetics and Computational Biology from the University of York.