Prof Lionel Clarke OBE is the former Co-Chairman of the UK Engineering Biology Leadership Council, and Director of BionerG Ltd.
Following academic research in Imperial College, in Cambridge University and in Grenoble, France (as a Royal Society European Research Fellow), Lionel began his career developing environmentally-improved transport fuels with Shell, initially as global technical lead pioneering the global phase-out of leaded gasoline and, from 2000, the development of advanced biofuels. He left Shell in 2014 to form his own bio-environmental consultancy focussed on carbon removal technology. He was invited by the UK government in 2011 to chair the generation of the UK Synthetic Biology Roadmap, and subsequently to co-chair together with a senior government minister the UK’s Engineering Biology Leadership Council (EBLC), an independent advisory council.
Lionel is a visiting professor in the Department of Bioengineering in Imperial College and holds an honorary professorial chair in the Faculty of Chemistry in the University of Manchester. In 2019 he was awarded an OBE by HM Queen Elizabeth for services to Synthetic Biology.