He’ll tell you that he’s ‘just a scientist’, but in truth, the successful combination of Professor Richard Furneaux’s scientific nous and entrepreneurial spirit has not only generated tens of millions of dollars of economic activity for New Zealand over the past 25 years, it has also now won him the Baldwins Researcher Entrepreneur Award and the BNZ Supreme Award at the 2017 KiwiNet Research Commercialisation Awards.
Richard—who is the Director of the Ferrier Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington— started his career as a synthetic chemist. Today, he leads a team of 40 scientists whose innovative medical drug compounds have been licensed to international pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies, and an exciting new start up.
