Llewellyn Cox PhD
BIO
Llewellyn is a British-American scientist, entrepreneur, and investor based in Los Angeles.
He is currently the Executive Director of Corporate Relations for the University of Southern California, working to build meaningful, long-term collaborative relationships to connect world-class research at USC with industry partners.
Educated at the Universities of Sheffield and Cardiff (1), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Weill Cornell Medical School (2) in New York, Llewellyn is an accomplished research scientist with expertise in cell & molecular biology, developmental biology, and neuroscience.
Llewellyn has been an active member of LA's biotech startup community for over a decade, where he has played a key role in a number of startup biotech companies, including founding:
Lab Launch, a network of affordable entry-level R&D lab spaces for small and startup biotech companies
MarsBio, a unique public-private venture fund in partnership with the County of Los Angeles
Llewellyn also retains a part-time faculty appointment at the University of Southern California, where he lectures on pharmaceutical commercialization and science communications in the Keck School of Medicine, Department of Cancer Biology
(1) I discovered PLC-zeta: the "Spark of Life" that awakens the senescent egg immediately following fertilization by a sperm cell.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12416999/
http://dev.biologists.org/content/129/15/3533.long
(2) I described a novel mechanism of intracellular signaling in developing neurons; the local synthesis of proteins from specifically-trafficked mRNAs in distal regions, providing a retrograde feedback signal to affect cellular homeostasis and cell fate in the nucleus. Later studies have shown this mechanism to be pervasive and persistent throughout the life of neurons, with a critical role in synapse-specific memory formation.
http://www.nature.com/ncb/journal/v10/n2/full/ncb1677.html
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/21/5727.long
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7053/full/nature03885.html