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Simon Haikney, IPO

Simon is a Divisional Director and SRO of Transformation, Manage Services and Customer, and has been a public servant for more than 25 years.

He has been at the IPO for thirteen years, having started his career with nine years in Ministry of Justice on frontline delivery of court services, before spending five years in the Wales Office, including a stint as Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Wales.

Simon is helping to shape the IPO’s transformation. He’s led work to modernise services and improve customer experience and is passionate about leadership that supports people through change.

Laura Starrs, IPO

Laura is currently the Head of Transformation Business Operations in Secure Patents having joined the UK IPO in 2003 as a patent examiner and later working for over a decade in international patent law policy. She has worked on a range of issues including international patent law harmonisation, cooperation between IP offices, as well as efforts across Europe to create a Unified Patent Court and Unitary Patent. Before taking on her current role, Laura led a patent examination group specialising in medicinal and polymer chemistry for 7 years.

Prior to joining the IPO, Laura was a research physicist specialising in Soft Condensed Matter. She gained her PhD from Edinburgh University in 2000 and held research positions at Bristol University and at the Centre de Recherché Paul Pascal laboratories in Bordeaux, France.

Simeon Bowen, IPO

Simeon is Communications Lead for the One IPO Transformation Programme. He has worked in public sector communications for 15 years, having previously worked in a variety of comms roles at the Office for National Statistics and UK Statistics Authority. Simeon joined the IPO in 2020 and acts as a key link between IPO developers and customers. In his spare time, Simeon is an avid gamer and a Tae Kwon-do instructor.

Debbie Cooke, IPO

Debbie Cooke is Head of Business Change at the IPO. She has worked for the IPO for over 35 years and has worked in the trade marks, patents and corporate areas. Debbie heads up a team of 11 business change managers and works across the business, project teams and customers to ensure the new services and internal processes are successfully delivered. Outside of work, Deb enjoys archery and is the current Team manager for the Welsh Senior and Junior archery teams.

Julyan Elbro, IPO

Julyan Elbro is Divisional Director in charge of Patent Examination in the Intellectual Property Office, with overall responsibility for the patents service.  In this role he wears a variety of hats, including responsibility for the part of the current project to transform the Office’s digital capability relating to patent applications and granting.  With an academic background in mathematics and computer science, he has worked at the Intellectual Property Office since 1998, originally as a Patent Examiner, but also spending some time in the Office’s Policy Directorate covering a range of portfolios including biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, and the World Trade Organisation TRIPs Agreement.  He returned to patent examining in 2006 as head of the group dealing with computing inventions, before taking broader responsibility across patent examination in 2009. His current role includes responsibility for the whole application to grant process and the associated digital services in the patents area.  He is currently active in a number of international fora, notably the EPO’s Committee on Patent Law and he chairs an international working group on Substantive Patent Law Harmonisation.

Richard Wood, IPO

Richard joined the IPO in 2008 as a Patent Examiner, working primarily in the pure and applied chemical subject matter areas. In 2022 he joined the Business Change team as the lead Business Change Manager for the Secure IP project, which is the project under our Transformation programme that is concerned with the filing-to-grant process.

Tina Byrne, IPO

Tina is Trade Mark Subject Matter Expert in the Transformation programme.  She works closely with teams across the programme to support Transformation initiatives. She joined the IPO as a Trade Mark Examiner before moving to the International Examination team as a Team Manager. Outside of work, she enjoys hiking, reading, and cycling along the canal.