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Director

Richard Gillingwater CBE

Richard Gillingwater is currently the Chair of SSE, the renewable energy and networks group, and Janus Henderson, a global asset manager. After a career in finance, he set up and ran UK Government Investments, created to manage the Government’s state-owned businesses, and chaired the UK’s development finance business, CDC, investing in Africa and Asia. He has also served as Dean of Cass Business School and as Chair of the Open University and has wide board experience.

Gillingwater has a law degree from Oxford University, and an MBA from IMD Lausanne.

Director

John-Arne Røttingen MD PhD MSc MPA

John-Arne Røttingen is Chief Executive Officer of Wellcome, UK. He has served as Ambassador for Global Health at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Norway, been Adjunct Scientific Director at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and Visiting Fellow of Practice at Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University. He was the founding Chief Executive Officer of CEPI – Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and has been the Chief Executive of the Research Council of Norway; Executive Director of Infection Control and Environmental Health at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health; Professor of Health Policy at the Department of Health Management and Health Economics, Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo; and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

He is member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and international member of the US National Academy of Medicine. He received his MD and PhD from the University of Oslo, an MSc from Oxford University and an MPA from Harvard University, and was awarded H.M. the King’s Gold Medal for his doctoral dissertation.

COO

Richard Wooldridge

Richard was most recently the head of operations and lead for a global team of over 300 including software, hardware and data engineers along with operations teams at Amazon. The team was focused on developing and launching ultra-fast, last-mile delivery services in under 60 minutes, these efforts included data collection and labeling, manufacturing, supply chain systems integration, and commercial delivery. Richard has over two decades of executive experience in the tech industry, leading teams at companies such as Facebook, Google, and Motorola, driving growth, and enhancing product operations and innovation, from early stage to commercialization. He has also held several diverse positions, including at Barnes and Noble as the Vice President of Operations and Logistics, at Flex as the Senior Vice President of Global Operations and Consumer Electronics Division, and at Nokia as Vice President of operations and technology, working in over 9 countries spanning the globe. Richard has a degree in engineering and is originally from the United Kingdom.

Director

Paul Schreier

Paul Schreier was appointed Wellcome’s Interim Chief Executive Officer in February 2023. He joined the Wellcome Trust as Chief Operating Officer in 2019, responsible for Wellcome’s internal and international operations. He is also a member of the investment committee that oversees Wellcome’s investments’ activities.

Paul was born in Australia and came to the UK for university, taking his BA, Master’s and PhD degrees in engineering at Cambridge before joining the Royal Navy, subsequently serving as a navigator and fighter controller. After commanding a ship, he left to join McKinsey & Company’s London office, where he became a partner before moving to Kuala Lumpur. In 2010, he was appointed to the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, becoming deputy secretary with responsibility for economic policy and strategy.

Later, he served as deputy vice-chancellor and chief operating officer at Macquarie University in Sydney, before joining Hakluyt, a professional services firm, in 2016 as chief executive.

He is a member of the Council of the National Army Museum in London, and is on the board of the Francis Crick Institute in London, and the Sanger Institute near Cambridge.

Director

Fiona Powrie

Professor Dame Fiona Powrie is Director of the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, University of Oxford. She gained a PhD in immunology from the University of Oxford and then moved to the DNAX Research Institute in Palo Alto. She returned to the University of Oxford in 1996 where she was the Sidney Truelove Professor of Gastroenterology and Head of the Translational Gastroenterology Unit from 2009-2014.

Fiona’s research is focused on interaction between the intestinal microbiome and the immune system. She identified the role of regulatory T cells in controlling intestinal inflammation and established the cytokine IL-23 as a therapeutic target in inflammatory bowel disease. She is particularly interested in translating basic research into clinical application. She led the Oxford Biomedical Research Centre’s Gastroenterology and Mucosal Immunology theme and with colleagues established the Accelerated Therapy for Arthritis Programme, a clinical research network designed to increase the testing of novel therapies in the clinic.

She serves on a number of scientific advisory boards including the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Imagine Institute in Paris and the Evergrande Centre in Boston. She received the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2012 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2011, EMBO in 2013, the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2014 and the US National Academy of Sciences in 2020.

Ethical, Legal, and Societal Implications.

As an organization that challenges conventional wisdom and aims to create more breakthroughs in health, we often find ourselves in uncharted territory.

Patients, families, and communities need advances in human health, and they need them faster. Fundamental new discoveries, new ways of thinking, and new tools that lead to breakthroughs, often require that we simultaneously and responsibly develop frameworks related to the ethical, legal, and societal implications resulting from these breakthroughs. Privacy concerns. Potential misuse of new technologies. Unintended consequences. Rather than ignore or leave such issues for others to solve, we do our best to consider the possible implications of breakthroughs before we even achieve them.

With that in mind— and complementing our networks of scientists and problem-solvers—we’ve convened a group of independent, diverse, multi-disciplinary experts from around the world to advise us with their combined expertise in ethics, cybersecurity, data privacy and consent, financial risk management, information management, and more. We consult regularly with these experts to make sure we’re considering the ethical, legal, and societal implication of emerging breakthroughs—near and far.

Just like we stack the odds to increase the likelihood of creating breakthroughs, we work to increase the likelihood that these advances help bring about the kind of world we want to live in. Together.

Diversity and Inclusion.

Creating breakthroughs in human health is hard. It requires innovation and demands that we solve complex problems. And complex problems are better solved by diverse teams.

At Wellcome Leap, we set the initial objectives outlined below to help ensure we achieve the level of diversity and collaboration needed to accelerate breakthroughs in human health. Our strong belief is that goals around diversity and inclusion should be clear, transparent, and measurable. Importantly, we recognize that representation is not enough — diversity is necessary, but insufficient. To achieve the desired results, it is also necessary that unique voices and contributions are welcomed and part of decision making.

To this end, our first goals are centered on inclusion and representation (from different ethnicities, races, genders, in addition to geographies and ecosystems) in our leadership, funding decisions, and program execution.

Leadership:

Build a diverse Board of Directors by recruiting up to 3 additional members. Our board is currently 40% female and international; our next focus is on expanding race and ethnicity.
Build diverse slates of new Program Directors (PDs) and seek to hire a diverse cohort as measured across approximately 20 PDs over the next 5 years. Notably, because PDs are hired for fixed terms of 3 to 4 years, and the numbers are small, the diversity of this group may shift significantly over time.

Funding decisions and program execution:

Conduct competitive calls where potential performers, at all stages of career and from diverse organizations and backgrounds, have an equal shot at applying and contributing to the program goals. We have no traditional eligibility criteria for performers in terms of career stage, type of researcher or discipline, type of or location of host institution.
Engage a diverse team of advisors to offer input to the Program Director in the proposal evaluation and selection process; measure representation of proposers through the funnel from abstract to funding decision as a means of testing the equitability of our selection processes. If we find disparities, we will assess why, adjust, and track for improvement.
Ensure program teams work collaboratively toward the program goals, in an environment characterized by rigor, openness, humility, and fairness. Wellcome Leap programs are expected to have not only skilled, capable people, but skilled, capable people who can also work together. Program Directors are expected to set expectations for the team working environment and have the authority to discontinue project funding if standards are not met in both ‘how’ and ‘what’ performers contribute. Unlike individual efforts designed to achieve a goal alone, our programs require multi-disciplinary teams from universities, companies, and non-profit labs working together to solve problems that they cannot solve alone. This creates a rare shared incentive to be open to diverse viewpoints and work together effectively.
Be quantitative in setting and assessing goals. Over the last decade, numerous studies on annual evaluations and promotion criteria in companies and universities have shown that specificity in goals and measures of success creates more equity and encourages participation from all members of a team.

An unwavering commitment.

Our mandate is to increase and accelerate breakthroughs in human health. This requires a commitment to bold programs executed with speed and agility by diverse, creative teams. Oftentimes as the work progresses, new challenges or opportunities are revealed. Our commitment is to adjust collaboratively with program participants. This necessarily means that the tasks and teams of performers may change throughout execution – milestones will be modified, adjusted, take on more or less intensity; some performers will leave; new team members will join. The Program Director is responsible for orchestrating activities around a common, specific, and quantifiable goal. For these reasons, our funding is in the form of contracts, rather than grants.

This form of funding is intended to expand options and complement other research and development efforts. Higher-risk ideas that are often central in a Wellcome Leap program, may not find support elsewhere. It’s a decidedly different way of working, focused on collaboration, intense in pace, mission oriented, and dynamic — we are confident that this type of work adds to both what we accomplish and how we work — together.

Who becomes a Wellcome Leap program director?

The best Program Directors (PDs) are individuals who possess the skills of the best CEOs of science- or engineering-based start-ups. Some PDs may have held such positions. Others may come from academia, government labs, corporations, and nonprofits. They need to have deep technical or scientific knowledge, be natural risk takers, and be thought leaders who can create a vision that inspires an entire community to action.

The PD must orchestrate the entire effort. He or she determines what pieces of work are needed to produce a specific result, conducts a proposal competition, and contracts organizations to do the work. Program Directors then oversee the collection of performers, manage the technical details, and make all the major program decisions. They handle budgets, contracts, execution issues, speaking engagements, and partner relationships. This may entail explaining a project in three minutes to a world leader who may or may not have a technical background, delivering a technical talk at a research conference, working out intellectual property concerns with a university, discussing necessary regulatory changes needed to allow new advances to make an impact, or negotiating for follow on transition work with partners.

Many, but not all, project leaders have PhDs. Typically, they’re 5 to 10 years past earning their last degree, and already have made important achievements (delivering a product to market, successfully leading a university research center, starting a company). Confidence is important. These mid career leaders may recruit people who are older with accomplished reputations; they must be able to hold their own. Notably, they rarely have MBAs. The skill set that you acquire in business school is often about defining the market opportunity, writing a plan, and then faithfully executing it. By contrast, successful program directors are more focused on managing constant flux — building, replanning, changing tack, and moving talent in and out as project needs shift.

Director

Ho Ching

Ms. Ho Ching is Chairman of Temasek Trust, a non-profit philanthropic trust.

Ho Ching recently retired as CEO & Executive Director of Temasek Holdings with effect from 1 October 2021. During her 17-year tenure as CEO, she oversaw its transformation into a global long-term investor.

Ho Ching began her 11-year engineering career with the Ministry of Defence in 1976, where she rose to become Director, Defence Materiel Organisation and concurrently Deputy Director, Defence Science Organisation.

In 1987, Ho Ching joined the Singapore Technologies group as its Director of Engineering, and became its President & CEO (1997 – 2001). She was the founding Chairman of Singapore Technologies Engineering, and joined Temasek as Executive Director in 2002.

Ho Ching is a Distinguished Engineering Alumnus of the National University of Singapore, and a Fellow of the Academy of Engineering Singapore. She has served in various public service organisations, including as Chairman of the Singapore Institute of Standards and Industrial Research, and as Deputy Chairman of the Singapore Economic Development Board, and the National Productivity Board.

In the non-profit space, she is also Chairman of the Trailblazer Foundation, and advisor to the Autism Resource Centre. She is the patron of the Autism Association of Singapore, and the Assisi Hospice Singapore.

She holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) from the University of Singapore (now National University of Singapore), and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, USA.

Why does Wellcome Leap’s model of innovation matter?

One of the primary elements of the model’s past success is its emphasis on bringing basic scientists and engineers together to work on a single project with bold goals and tight timelines. This creates a cauldron of activity that is driven by the urgency and demands of a global problem. This kind of work falls into what’s known as Pasteur’s Quadrant.

Opportunities in Pasteur’s Quadrant are perishable in time. Either the problem shifts or the science does. So speed and agility are important. And because the goals are ambitious, we most often require diverse ideas and a vibrant mix of participants working from their home organizations. This is almost a unique characteristic of Pasteur’s Quadrant projects, which are almost always multi-discipline, multi-community, multi-stage and dynamically adapting throughout the program.

This also requires strong partnerships, humility, and respect. Because work in Pasteur’s Quadrant depends on a robust basic science discovery engine and organizations that scale innovations in the public and private sector.

This strategy is described in more detail in “Special Forces Innovation: How DARPA Attacks Problems”, Harvard Business Review, Dugan & Gabriel, 2013.