Director, University Commercialisation and Innovation (UCI) Policy Evidence Unit, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge

Tomas is the Director of the University Commercialisation and Innovation (UCI) Policy Evidence Unit at the University of Cambridge. The UCI Policy Evidence Unit supports governments, funders, and universities in delivering a step change in the contributions universities make to innovation and economic prosperity – nationally and locally – through their commercialisation and other innovation-focused activities and partnerships.

The Unit’s activities focus on improving the evidence base available to develop more effective approaches to supporting and enabling university-driven commercialisation and innovation activities. Projects will draw on the latest insights from both academia and practice, as well as learning from experiences in the UK and internationally.

He is an expert adviser to government funding agencies on knowledge exchange, and his work on the focus and impact of knowledge exchange funding has been instrumental in providing a robust evidence base to support their policy development and evaluation work.

His research interests include

• Universities and innovation systems: roles, contributions and diversity
• Influence of the demand and supply context on university-industry knowledge exchange
• Configurations of knowledge exchange support within universities
• University-industry partnership models
• Capturing and demonstrating knowledge exchange performance
• Improving the availability of robust evidence for knowledge exchange policymakers and practitioners

Prior to setting up the UCI Policy Evidence Unit, Tomas was a researcher at the Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy at the University of Cambridge. Until 2012 he was Assistant Director of a leading UK economic development consultancy, Public and Corporate Economic Consultants (PACEC) directing and managing a range of strategic development and evaluation projects for public policy clients in the area of knowledge exchange, innovation and regional economic development.

He has an M.Phil in Economics from the Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge and a M.Eng in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial College London, where his dissertation focused on turbulent boundary layers under varying shear conditions.