I am delighted to announce that Professor Alejandro (Alex) Frangi will take up the role of Director of the Pankhurst Institute, effective immediately. The Institute promotes needs-led health technology research and innovation, providing end-to-end support for translation into practice, and is the flagship for the University’s rapidly expanding health technology portfolio.

The Directorship of the Institute is a natural addition to Alex’s existing portfolio. Alex is the Bicentennial Turing Chair in Computational Medicine at the University of Manchester,

Manchester, UK, with joint appointments at the Department of Computer Science and the School of Health Sciences. He is also the Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies, with a focus on Precision Computational Medicine for in silico trials of medical devices.

An Alan Turing Institute Fellow and a pioneer of computational medicine, Alex has made internationally leading contributions in fundamental and translational computational medical imaging and image-based computational medicine. He contributed novel statistical analysis methods to the fields of population imaging (UK Biobank) and in silico clinical trials. His highly interdisciplinary work has been translated to cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and neurological diseases areas, accounting for over 40% of the NHS expenditure.

More recently, Alex’s work in haemorrhagic stroke combining digital twins and regulatory science culminated in the first in silico trial of a Medtronic flow diversion device for treating intracranial aneurysms. It demonstrated the possibility of replicating and expanding findings of three randomised controlled trials and international registries for a fraction of their cost and increased thoroughness testing effectiveness and safety.

In congratulating Alex on this new appointment, I also want to thank Professor Niels Peek who is stepping down from the Directorship. As Director, Niels has built on the initial promise of the Institute, strengthened the team and created an effective leadership that has been able to build new partnerships and ensure that this Institute has a new physical home – no small achievement in itself.

Niels will be supporting Alex as Deputy Director of the Pankhurst Institute until January 2024 when he will leave us to join the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the

University of Cambridge.

I hope you will join me in thanking Niels for his contribution to the success of the Pankhurst Institute, and in congratulating Alex on this new addition to his portfolio.

Best Wishes

Professor Chris Taylor

Chair, Christabel Pankhurst Institute Board
Associate Vice President, Digital Strategy and Innovation, The University of Manchester