Essays A Start Up is (Not) All You Need: Exploring the Innovation Design Space Seen through a one-dimensional lens - public research on the left, commercial spin-out on the right - ARIA's investments look indefensible. But the map is wrong, not the decisions.
Essays The Geometry of Expertise: Mapping R&D Capability in High Dimensions A university is between an R&D lab and an open-source project. Top-down levers fail. So I built a pipeline to map 1,900 researchers as a navigable knowledge space to turn 'corridor knowledge' into strategy.
Essays Evaluating the Incomparable: How to Judge a Portfolio of One When evaluating a "portfolio-of-one," the attempt to use standard metrics isn't rigour, it’s category error. From promotions panels to VC offices, our obsession with defensible metric counting often masks the very potential we claim to be seeking.
MBA The Consultants Aren't the Problem Universities don't have a consultant problem; they have a strategic capability vacuum. Academia excels at producing research, but our incentive structures actively punish structural, S-type innovation. It's time to stop outsourcing our strategy and start building S-type leadership capacity.
Tharaka Weeraddana Congratulations Tharaka! Congratulations to group PhD Tharaka who has passed his PhD viva with minor corrections. Dr Jack Alexander-Webber (Cambridge) and Dr Alex Walton (Manchester Chemistry) acted as external examiners.
MBA The Incomplete Map: Why Materials Science Won't Have Its AlphaFold Moment AlphaFold is a powerful interpolator, not an extrapolator. Savage's small vs large world framework explains why - and why the real prize in materials AI is building tools that know what they don't know.
Academia Fail Fast, Learn Faster - Rethinking Talent Up-Skilling I built a decentralized micro-fund to upskill 400+ postdocs. It funded great science, but data revealed broken incentives and AI vulnerabilities. Here is my post-mortem on failing fast in leadership, and redesigning a high-signal skills accelerator.
MBA Marketing Discovery: Whither PhDs? Peter Drucker said marketing makes selling superfluous. Today? We are effectively cold-calling geniuses to accept near-minimum wages for a 20% shot at a job. The legacy PhD model is broken. It’s time to stop selling an academic lottery ticket and start engineering a levered asset.
MBA Sovereign Ambidexterity: A VRIO View from Seoul The UK excels at low-TRL discovery; Korea defines the 'Super-Gap' in scaling. Alone, we face limits. Together, can we create a perfect 'Ambidextrous' partnership? I explore how a transnational VRIO strategy couples these strengths to flatten the deeptech J-Curve.
MBA Scaling the 11th Century Start-up, or, Why Universities Break People 53% of academics show signs of depression. This is a role design failure, not a resilience issue: we are managing 21st-century experts with medieval guild structures. To fix the crisis, we must abandon the 'Lone Wolf' myth and re-engineer the role. Don't blame the players; change the game.
MBA The £13B non-profit: Valuing the modern University "University isn't worth it?" Applying a corporate valuation model to UK HE reveals a £13bn asset - more than Man Utd & City combined. It’s time to stop managing universities like charities and start valuing them as sovereign utilities.
neolab Equity for Equations: The Rise of Venture-Backed Physics I started 2026 with a grant rejection letter. Meanwhile, 'Neolabs' like Periodic and SSI are raising billions without a product. We are witnessing the birth of a new asset class: the venture-backed Institute for Advanced Study.
Training UKRN: Responsible Research Metrics Patrick completed training from the UK Reproducibility Metric, on the topic of Responsible use of Research Metrics. This programme, delivered by Southampton University, helped to design a course to be delivered on the responsible use of citations, h-index, etc.
Group Photo Group Christmas '25 Despite Patrick being terrible at arranging anything, the group met for Christmas dinner and to celebrate a successful year. We were joined by recent group departee Stephen Church (Salford), and collaborator Rajalaxmi Sahoo (Leeds) who was in town (but out of photo).
PhD viva PhD viva: Examiner at Cambridge Patrick was external examiner for Ningning Gao, alongside internal examiner Prof. Rachel Oliver at the University of Cambridge. Ningning's supervisor is Prof Hannah Joyce.
Publication New Publication: Self-Catalyzed AlGaAs Nanowires and AlGaAs/GaAs Axial Heterostructures Grown by Molecular Beam Epitaxy A new paper in collaboration with the Huiyun Liu group (UCL), Ana Sanchez group (Warwick) and David Mowbray group (Sheffield). In our contribution, led by Stephen Church, we showed that a previously low quality structure (AlGaAs) can be made to emit strongly at room temperature. Reference: Self-Catalyzed AlGaAs Nanowires and
Publication New Publication: Wavelength-tunable femtosecond pulsed laser for the characterisation of solid-state sensors Group PhD Nawal Al-Amairi (now lecturer at UTAS Oman) has published a device work in collaboration with the particle physics team at Manchester. In this new work, an ultrafast laser system is used to characterize different device structures for particle detection, revealing a broad spectrum approach to novel 3D detectors.
Farewell Fairwell: Stephen Church A farewell to group postdoc (and later research Fellow) Stephen Church, who (after 14 years) leaves the university for a new role as a lecturer at the University of Salford. Many thanks for all your work, and we look forward to seeing what you achieve next!
Publication New Publication: As-Flux-Induced Diameter Control in GaAs Nanowires A new paper has been published in J Phys Chem C led by the Huiyun Liu group at UCL, with Stephen Church as lead Manchester contributor. In this work, an improved growth approach for GaAs nanowires is introduced that provides a route to generate diameter control and a method to
Conference Talk Talks at Nanowire Week The group attended and spoke at Nanowire week in Cambridge. Stephen Church: dot-in-wire emitters Ishika Das: Wafer scale mapping of nanowires Tharaka Weeradanna: microfludics for nanowires
Publication New Publication: Interfaces in Epitaxially Grown Zn3P2 Nanowires and Their Composition-Dependent Optoelectronic Properties for Photovoltaic Applications A new paper in collaboration with Simon Escobar Steinvall (Lund University) was accepted for publication in Chemistry of Materials. In this work, high throughput spectroscopy was used to understand the variation in emission energy of ZnP nanowires in InP. This materials, whilst relatively old, is now seen as a potential
University of Oxford Oxford Nanotechnology talk and Celebration Patrick gave a group highlights talk at the Oxford Nanotechnology Symposium at the Clarendon Building. This symposium was arranged in honour of Prof. Chennupati Jagadish being elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Nikesh Patel Graduation day: Nikesh Patel Congratulations again to Dr Nikesh Patel who graduated in the sunshine of Manchester. He'll be taking a role with the startup aegiq in Sheffield.
Publication New Paper: Microstructure determines crystallinity-driven singlet fission efficiency in diF-TES-ADT Dr Hoyeon Choi has had the final paper of his PhD accepted in Scientific Reports. This work, in collaboration with Prof Jenny Clark at the University of Sheffield uses hyperspectral mapping to study spatial inhomogeneities in singlet fission materials. Combined with time-resolved spectroscopic measurements, this work shows the role of
invited talk Conference: ICMAT-2025, Singapore Patrick gave an invited talk at the ICMAT 2025 conference in Singapore. His talk, on "Single Shot Multi-Objective Optimization for Epitaxially-Grown Microring Lasers" reports recent work done in a collaboration between Manchester, the Australian National University, and A*STAR Singapore.
