Richard Compton

Richard joined Oxford Nanopore in 2016 to help build our commercial team from scratch. He is now responsible for the leadership of commercial operations units including global IT, business systems, digital services, global commercial operations, technical and customer services.

His remit includes key Customer Relationship Management including leading support of the Abu Dhabi Genome Programme; the world-leading population-scale initiative to develop personalised care and personalised medicine for the region.

Richard also ensures our commercial systems, processes and teams are ready to scale and support our continued growth – drawing on experience from leading Illumina’s EMEA Region, as Vice President and General Manager, prior to joining Oxford Nanopore.

At Illumina, Richard led a team of over 300 people and grew revenues by over $300m across a three-year timeframe. He also led the support of multiple population-scale sequencing programmes including Genomics England and deCODE genetics.

Richard also brings 12 years of experience as VP and General Manager (EMEA) of Dassault Systèmes Biovia. In this role he helped commercial and research customers successfully integrate and deploy enterprise scale software solutions in research and quality/regulated environments.

Richard holds a degree in Biochemistry with Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Birmingham.