Dr Arnie Patel
Senior Commercialisation Manager (Life Sciences)
Dr Arnie Patel is a Senior Commercialisation Manager working across the Life Sciences portfolio at Cambridge Enterprise.
His role consists of building early-stage scientific opportunities and academic relations across the entire Cambridge University ecosystem.
In 2021 while writing up his PhD thesis, Dr Patel worked in the Industry Partnerships and Commercialisation team in Medicine at Imperial College London before embarking on the prestigious LifeArc London Technology Transfer Fellowship, where he experienced technology transfer across four London institutions (Queen Mary Innovations, LifeArc, Imperial Enterprise Start-up Team and UCL Ventures). He subsequently spent four years at UCL Ventures as an Associate Business Manager.
Dr Patel achieved his MSci degree in Chemistry at UCL (2012-2016) and then pursued an Interdisciplinary PhD (Organic, Physical and Quantum Computational Chemistry; 2016-2021) on firefly bioluminescence at UCL, where he disentangled the electronic structure and excited state dynamics of the firefly light-emitting species, oxyluciferin, for the first time, and synthesised novel oxyluciferin derivatives. His work culminated in the development of novel bioluminescent tools, a breakthrough paper for unravelling highly complex photoelectron spectra, and was recognised with an award at the 2019 RSC UK-Italy Joint Meeting on Photochemistry and Photophysics.
During his time of study, he competed in the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games in artistic gymnastics where he was awarded the 2015 University of London Sportsman of the Year. Turning adversity into opportunity, Dr Patel reinvented his sporting career as a triple jumper after a gymnastics-ending injury in 2015, and continues to compete today.
Dr Patel joined Cambridge Enterprise in September 2026.
