Nirmala Santiapillai

Nirmala joined Oxford Nanopore in 2020 to develop the global services team. Her remit includes leading our customer service, technical and commercial operations functions.

Nirmala initially focused on establishing regionalised customer service to serve local customers in their local time zones and languages. To this end, she onboarded three new leaders who, in turn, have been growing their teams so all are replete with the right talent, capabilities, performance metrics and training.

Nirmala works in partnership with others in senior management to ensure customer service is optimised from the root. She has also created successful business process outsourcing for some straightforward deliverables so her Oxford Nanopore teams can focus on more challenging customer issues.

Nirmala is now focused on continuing to collaborate to deliver positive customer experience, technical support for customers to drive optimal utilisation and scaling commercial operations through increased automation.

Nirmala has worked in the healthcare field since 1989 and has programme leadership and business improvement experience gained from corporate and start-up environments. Prior to joining Oxford Nanopore she worked for General Electric where she held marketing, commercial and customer experience roles within the healthcare business.

Nirmala has a PhD in Neurochemistry from the University of Cambridge and a BSc in Biochemistry from Imperial College London.