Dr Lysimachos Zografos

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Lysimachos leads our award-winning Wellcome iTPA accelerator programme, supporting innovation in human health and wellbeing, bridging the skills gap and funding ideas. As one of our Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, he supports scientists who want their research to make a difference through practical application in the real world.

Ten questions with Dr Lysimachos Zografos

When did you start at Edinburgh Innovations (EI)?

I joined EI in December 2018 as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence.  

How would you explain your job to an alien?

As an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, I help researchers turn their research ideas and findings to solutions for real-world problems.  

This could look like many things. It means being a sounding board and providing a fresh pair of eyes or a wider perspective, being a devil’s advocate, acid testing, helping with planning and facilitating a structured approach, supporting with funding, getting into the nitty-gritty of who will benefit from solutions and how, helping articulate complex ideas simply and making clear and attractive business propositions, focussing on what is important at the right time, and creating new relationships with stakeholders or collaborators.  

As a Project Lead for Wellcome iTPA I coordinate the delivery of an embedded accelerator programme supporting innovation in human health and wellbeing, bridging the skills gap and providing funding to ideas.  

What did you do before EI?

I founded a drug discovery company specialising in neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation. I also played around with developing products based on a couple of other ideas in the digital therapeutics space and had a short run providing specialist advice to other companies.  

What’s the best thing about working at EI/the University of Edinburgh?

At the University we get to work with one of the brightest, motivated and diverse group of researchers, at a prestigious institution that underpins everything with a strong strategic vision. It’s fertile ground with a solid foundation. At EI we get to work with colleagues who have an incredible amount of real-world experience and insight.

What is most important though is that across both organisations there is a strong culture of innovating responsibly and in line with social and civic responsibility.  

Favourite project that you’ve worked on? What did the project accomplish?

It’s really difficult to choose. Although I have a biomedical background, I tend to be most impressed by lateral thinking approaches that bring together a solution from a “distant” domain to directly solve a persisting problem. Instances of this can be found in many projects the team has supported including: a data-driven defibrillator placement platform, a neurodiversity school inclusion programme, and emerging work transferring traditional community-informed practices to treatment of complex addiction problems.  

What are you most proud of from your time at EI?

Working with an excellent team that draws on so many diverse and complementary skills and delivering what has been recognised a transformational programme when it comes to the engagement of those that are new to translating their research.  

What does innovation mean to you?

Understanding the problem statement and who’s involved. Balancing push (improving the technology) and pull (understanding the problem). Listen, iterate and improve and if you fail, fail early.  

If you had one more hour in the day how would you spend it?

Ensuring more responsibility in innovation. Humanity develops technologies that are a practically an ongoing experiment with unpredictable impacts on our lives and the planet. We need to focus more on thinking through consequences and including more perspective from those who may be affected.  

What piece of advice has stuck with you?

There are hardly any new ideas under the sun. Execution makes all the difference.  

What’s would you really like to work on at EI/UoE

Developing a “studio” approach with shared infrastructure for innovation R&D – having worked on so many projects I see there are common threads in their needs for shared resources. That could range from digital prototyping to medicinal chemistry. 

Dr Lysimachos Zografos

Wellcome Entrepreneur-in-Residence and iTPA Programme Lead

Contact details

• Mobile: 07969 486 149
• Social media: LinkedIn
• Email: Lysimachos.Zografos@ei.ed.ac.uk