Meet the team driving Fibraxis Forward
Chief Executive Officer
Dr Rebecca Bignold, PhD
Rebecca has a prolific research career regarding allergic asthma, in particular, the contribution of pericytes (a type of mesenchymal stem cell) to airway structural damage. She has a background in Biochemistry before specialising in Biomedical research during her PhD.
The Fibraxis project was conceived as a part of her PhD, giving her both the in-depth knowledge and technical know-how essential for driving this project.
Her research is respected both in the UK and internationally, demonstrated by several impactful journal articles and invited talks at numerous national and international conferences, including in the USA and Canada.
She has taken part in the esteemed SPARK The Midlands and Plug and Play pre-clinical accelerator programmes.
Chief Scientific Officer
Dr Jill R Johnson, PhD
Jill is a Senior Lecturer and Principal Investigator at Aston University in Birmingham, UK.
Her research focus is on the mechanisms of airway remodelling in chronic lung disease, specifically investigating the progenitor cell capacity of pericytes and their ability to contribute to the pathogenesis of pulmonary fibrosis.
Dr Johnson received her PhD in 2007 from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, with a focus on the biology of allergic asthma.
She subsequently moved to the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, as a postdoctoral fellow to perform studies on the transcriptional regulation of epithelial-mesenchymal transition in cancer and allergic asthma. Dr Johnson then took up a second postdoctoral fellowship at the Meakins-Christie Laboratories at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, Canada to investigate epithelial-mesenchymal transition in primary bronchial epithelial cells derived from healthy subjects and severe asthmatics.
Dr Johnson then held a Research Fellow position at Imperial College London in the Leukocyte Biology section of the National Heart and Lung Institute, Faculty of Medicine, where she began studying the role of tissue-resident mesenchymal progenitor cells (pericytes) in driving lung fibrosis.
Chief Operations Officer
Dr Martina Pasini, PhD
Martina is a Business Development Coordinator in the Research and Knowledge Exchange department at Aston University.
She helps create collaborations between academia and companies, in particular within the areas of Engineering, Physical Science, Mathematics, Computer Science and Business.
She has a broad experience in Microbiology and Bio-engineering within the health, biotechnology and synthetic biology fields.
Chief Financial Officer
Elizabeth Dainty, ACA
Liz qualified as a chartered accountant with KPMG and has held senior positions in TNT Logistics.
Since 2016, she has been working with university spin-outs, aiding in investment raising, budgeting and strategy, governance and day-to-day growth to establish spin-outs as viable and commercially focused businesses
