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, a biotech company with around 450 employees, where she led its computational scientific development.

She 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. The group works on diverse problems across immunoinformatics, protein structure and small molecule drug discovery. They use statistics, artificial intelligence (AI) and computation to generate biological and medical insight.

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.