Together, Nigel Gaymond and Cynthia Clark create an experienced and energetic team with the industry knowledge, skills and contacts to make BELS a great success. They are dedicated to working with members of the BELS community to build a truly influential and productive organisation that accelerates progress in the sector.
Nigel Gaymond, BELS Founder & Executive Chairman
Nigel supports various initiatives that foster innovation to benefit industry, academia, patients and UK plc. His work with UK expats dates back to the 1990s when he developed a database of Scottish expats and ran events to initiate Scottish expat engagement, an effort that morphed into the highly successful, government-supported GlobalScot network. Since then, Nigel has become a recognised expert in harnessing the valuable talents of British diaspora and over many years he has shared his knowledge generously to benefit academic researchers, writers, consultants and government programmes.
In addition to nurturing BELS, Nigel advises established and emerging organisations across the global health and life sciences on corporate and business development, articulating vision and strategy, charting new directions, identifying market driven opportunities, stimulating and supporting innovation, driving ideas and facilitating change.
Early in his career, Nigel worked in the diplomatic service at the British Consulate in Boston where he oversaw the commercial section and served as the UK’s lead in the USA for biotechnology. He then founded his US-based consulting practice, Gaymond International, and for 17 years advised industry, academic, and government organisations spanning biopharmaceuticals, diagnostics, medical devices and informatics – in the US, Europe and parts of Asia.
After 25 years in the US, Nigel returned home to the UK in 2010 to head the UK BioIndustry Association (BIA) where he assimilated into the UK life sciences scene and shored up the BIA’s reputation, relevance, membership and finances. He expanded BIA member benefits to include a new purchasing programme that tapped the global purchasing power of BIO in the US; expanded the BIA’s presence beyond London to build its reputation throughout the UK and globally; moved the offices to sit closer to the heart of government in central London and to strengthen the BIA’s lobbying presence and activities; and strengthened strategic relationships with similar organisations in other parts of the world, including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India.
Cynthia Clark, BELS Co-Founder, Managing Director
Cynthia’s work with British expats dates back to 2000 with the original founding of BELS and delivery of its programme. Today, she steers the operations, planning and communications for BELS as the organisation expands connections in the UK to spark international collaboration and encourage commerce that speeds progress in the health and life sciences.
Cynthia’s experience in strategic marketing, communications and investing crosses corporate, business-to-business, consumer and public organisations. Before shifting to the life sciences sector, she held senior marketing management positions at institutional and retail investment firms in the US, including Putnam Investments, Colonial Mutual Funds (subsequently Columbia Funds/Bank of America), and The Boston Company (subsequently Bank of New York/Mellon).
In the financial services sector, Cynthia played a role in the movement that shifted people from being traditional savers to being smart personal investors. This involved developing and launching an array of new products and distribution channels. Today there is a parallel need to shift people from viewing healthcare as something that’s done to passive patients and more towards something patients do for themselves as active participants with greater personal accountability. One of the communications challenges involves democratising the information in personal health records, focusing on prevention, and encouraging people to contribute their health data to improve care and fuel medical research as concerned and participatory citizens. To contribute toward this movement, Cynthia helped establish the Personalised Healthcare Alliance and ran Patients4Data, a multi-year campaign highlighting the benefits of using patient data to improve healthcare and fuel medical research. As part of this work, she sat on the care.data Strategic Oversight Board, which worked to ensure that the initiative’s benefits were clearly communicated to patients in the NHS and the risks were appropriately mitigated. Wellcome Trust’s Understanding Patient Data initiative is now working to make uses of patient data more visible, understandable and trustworthy, for patients, the public and health professionals.