Harwell Campus CEO joins our October 'Science Cities' forum

Above: Harwell Campus, in 'science vale', Oxfordshire (courtesy Harwell Campus)

The CEO of Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire, Stuart Grant, will be contributing to our October 'Science Cities' forum in Oxford about the development of world class science R&D clusters.

Stuart is Co-Founder of CoreLife Investors, adviser to Brookfield’s Real Estate Group, as well as being CEO of Harwell Campus and he has more than 25 years of real estate experience. He began his career in Asia-Pacific as an International Executive with Jardine Matheson Ltd before starting his real estate investment career at Blackstone in London and Hong Kong. During his 18 years at Blackstone, he held a variety of leadership positions playing a key role in building Blackstone’s presence in the region including overseeing more than $20 billion of investments in Greater China, India, Singapore, Japan, Korea and Australia. He returned to the UK in 2018 as a Managing Director of Stanhope Plc to help grow one of London’s leading developers. He is also a member of the Investment Committee and Advisory Board of Mitheridge Capital.

Stuart described the ambitions for Harwell Campus during Future Cities Forum's 'digital cities' discussion last year:

'Harwell is a 100-acre campus with a focus on the energy, tech, space sector and life sciences, and where government collaborates with business and academia. We have 30 universities here as well as private organisations where the quantum sector is new. There is a £180 million allocation to move the Natural History Museum's species and digital resource collection to Harwell. I think 30% of the NHM collection is already digitalised and it will take around three to four years to complete the building of the centre. This will allow scientists all over the world to access the data and will be there for future generations to review. There will be hundreds of thousands of specimens from which scientists can work on tackling our climate challenges.

' There are already 6,000 people working here and £500 million to be invested over the next few years. We want to move forward with homes for our campus people with good amenities, where they can walk across the cricket pitch to work. There is already the plan for 300 homes for rent as well as a hotel with pubs and shops. It will be a unique place with a mix of uses and have a large village or town atmosphere. Brookfield bought into Harwell last year and we expect to grow the number of people working here to around 15,000 over the next few years.'

This summer the UK government via UKRI announced more funding for the Diamond Light Source (the Diamond-II programme), which is based at Harwell. It is the world-leading synchrotron which is 10,000 times more powerful than a standard microscope. Used for both academic and industrial research, this stadium-sized machine is the only one of its kind in the UK. According to Harwell, Diamond Light Source is a world-leading medium energy synchrotron facility producing high intensity x-rays. It works like a giant microscope, harnessing the power of electrons to produce intensely bright light that scientists can use to study anything from fossils to jet engines, viruses to vaccines.

With its first year of preliminary funding, the Diamond-II programme successfully passed the UK Government’s Outline Business Case milestone last November and has already delivered some of the machine magnet prototypes needed as part of the preliminary funding that was given over a year ago. UKRI’s announcement confirms the second year of preliminary funding of £2.8m to finalise the Diamond-II Full Business Case and secures the first phase of Diamond-II core investment

at £81.5m from April 2022-April 2025.