Join Professor Michelle Barbour in this captivating conversation with Professor Marc Holderied from the University of Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences. Discover how a serendipitous encounter with a fluffy moth in Costa Rica sparked a 30-year scientific journey that led to the development of ultra-thin, nature-inspired sound-absorbing materials.
🎙️ In this episode follow Marc’s path to Bristol and his passion for acoustics including:
- Fascinating collaborations with Bristol Zoo, including the discovery of a new frog species and a mysterious bat call
- The groundbreaking invention of an acoustic tomograph
- How moth wings inspired the creation of acoustic metamaterials
- Finding real-world applications from the study of moth wings from noise-reducing wallpaper to quieter aircraft cabins
- A dream to reduce the hidden health costs of urban noise pollution
Read his original research article : https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2313549121
⭐Highlights
0:00 – Introducing the Enterprise Sessions and Professor Marc Holderied
0:34 – Marc’s journey to Bristol
2:22 – Discovering new species of frogs and bats with Bristol Zoo
4:41 – How shaving a moth’s wings led to an enterprise opportunity
7:49 – How moths evolved an acoustic invisibility cloak to evade bats
13:01 – From research to enterprise: developing acoustic wallpaper and ultra-thin sound absorbers
16:46 – The societal impacts of noise pollution
21:48 – The role Enterprise Fellowships and the University of Bristol’s Commercialisation team and others in going from research to enterprise
🌐 About the Enterprise Sessions
The Enterprise Sessions bring together a diverse mix of company founders and researchers who talk openly about their personal experiences of forming spin-outs and start-ups, raising capital, academic-industry partnerships and the joys of translating research discoveries into real-world impact.
The series aims to inform, inspire and challenge myths and stereotypes about research commercialisation and how businesses and universities can work together to tackle society’s biggest challenges.
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If you found this episode inspiring or informative, please don’t forget to like and share. Visit our website or subscribe to the University of Bristol’s YouTube channel for more Enterprise Sessions.
https://www.bristol.ac.uk/enterprise-sessions
🔗 Connect with
Marc Holderied https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-holderied/
Michele Barbour https://www.linkedin.com/in/michele-barbour-7b049566/
Transcript :
00:00:08 Prof Michelle Barbour
Welcome to another enterprise session from the University of Bristol. My name is Professor Michelle Barbour, and today, I am enormously fortunate to be talking to Professor Marc Holderied, who is a member of our School of Biological Sciences. Marc, thank you so much. I have some idea of how busy you are, and I’m sure it’s 10,000 times more than I even know. So I’m really grateful to you for spending time with me today.
00:00:28 Prof Marc Holderied
Michelle, there’s nothing that would keep me from here. Thank you so much for having me.
00:00:31 Prof Michelle Barbour
Wonderful. This is going to be a great discussion.
00:00:34 Prof Michelle Barbour
OK, Marc. So maybe let’s kind of rewind in time. Let’s go back. So you’ve been at Bristol for a number of years now. You are a professor in our School of Biological Sciences, but what happened before that. What led you to Bristol and what led you to your area of research?
00:00:47 Prof Marc Holderied
I wanted to be a scientist before I could pronounce it. So actually it came naturally. I was asked to be a post doc here by one of my still colleagues about to retire -Gareth Jones- in the same department. Did that postdoc and returned to a bit of a tour of the world, and then I was headhunted. I got this phone call: “We’ve got these positions going. Don’t you want to apply?” I did and got here and never regretted it for a day.
00:01:11 Prof Michelle Barbour
Fantastic. Brilliant. So you ‘ve been at Bristol, you’ve gone away, and then that magnet that is Bristol just brought you back again.
00:01:17 Prof Marc Holderied
Absolutely. Yeah. Repeat offender, I’ve been called.
00:01:21 Prof Michelle Barbour
Brilliant. And before we get into your sort of your enterprise work, which is obviously the focus of our discussion today, what’s the day job in Biological Sciences? What do you do? Do you teach? Your research and so on?
00:01:33 Prof Marc Holderied
So, normal professorial schedule, I’d say. Maybe a bit heavy on the commercialisation side because of the stuff we’ll be talking about a bit later. But I teach, have a full teaching load. I do research, I’ve got a group of post grads and postdocs that I manage.
00:01:48 Prof Marc Holderied
And it’s all about acoustics for me. So my research is really into what amazing things we can do with sounds. And that goes from conservation acoustics, I work a lot with Bristol Zoo. I’m the academic from this university with the most links. Over the years, we had 20 postgrad students all over the world,
00:02:04 Prof Marc Holderied
o robotics I do sonar-guided robotics a bit, and then our bio-inspired research into ultrasound. And then trying to turn that into something that helps us. So looking for things where nature has found amazing solutions that then help us live better lives.
00:02:22 Prof Michelle Barbour
Fantastic. So before we get into that
00:02:25 Prof Michelle Barbour
tell me a little bit about your work with Bristol Zoo. What sorts of projects have you worked on with them over the years?
00:02:30 Prof Marc Holderied
So Bristol Zoo is just a fantastic resource that we have at our doorstep. They’ve got a very dedicated conservation team. So everybody visiting does a small donation, and my students are partly funded by this. And over the, I think 15 years, we’ve had so many PhD and Master’s students that we sent to many places. The vast majority going to Madagascar and working on different projects, a lot of it at lemurs. We’ve just had one student coming back working on the amphibians. He discovered a new species of frog, which is pretty amazing.
00:03:05 Prof Michelle Barbour
Wow. How many PhD students can say that I mean that’s incredible.
00:03:07 Prof Marc Holderied
It’s even a masters student only. So it’s even better. So now we need to sort of get that all but published and written up and ID and named. But what an exciting time for that student.
00:03:17 Prof Marc Holderied
And we’re about to send another student out to work on bats there. And 12 years ago, we recorded a bat call, which we know doesn’t belong to any known species. So again, we’ve got a real chance to catch that and describe it as a new species to science. So we’ve got a team aligned, international collaboration, to get that and at the core of this is another Masters student that we have with Bristol Zoo going to Madagascar.
00:03:43 Prof Michelle Barbour
What extraordinary experiences for your students so because that’s real-world discovery science, isn’t it? And I like the idea. I sort of think of identifying creatures organisms by what they look like, how they behave, their habits and so on. But actually sound has led you to recognize that this is something that needs to be looked at and characterised. It was sound that was the tip off. That was the kind of first clue, right?
00:04:03 Prof Marc Holderied
Absolutely. So allow me to digress. So there is Gareth Jones that I’ve mentioned before. He discovered a new species of bat in the UK. And these are cryptic species – before it was considered one, now it’s two – and the only way you can tell them apart is by their echolocation calls. So one is now called the Common pPipistrelle, the other is called the Soprano Pipistrelle because it has a higher voice.
00:04:27 Prof Michelle Barbour
Fantastic. So I can see straight away how you have become so deeply fascinated by acoustics, by the world of sound as it pertains to animals. I mean it’s, you know, it’s the way you tell it. How could you not be fascinated by that?
00:04:41 Prof Michelle Barbour
So tell me a little bit about the work that led up to you going on your enterprise journey, the research that the bedrock on which that’s founded.
00:04:50 Prof Marc Holderied
- So for that we have to go back quite a few years. I think the, not the Eureka moment but the first inspiration came when I was a PhD student pretty much exactly 30 years ago.
00:05:02 Prof Marc Holderied
I was invited by my then supervisor to Costa Rica to do some research.
00:05:06 Prof Marc Holderied
We were taking echo measurements of flowers and I saw this super fluffy moth sitting on a wall, so I captured it and I measured its wing echo, intact and then I shaved the wing trying to find out whether this fluff on their wings had any effect on the echo strength.
00:05:25 Prof Michelle Barbour
I love this. I’m just picturing Daily Mail headlines, student shaves, moth. No, no, there’s a really important scientific purpose to do this and it’s led you in lots of different interesting directions. I know. But I just, I could never resist thinking of the headline. Yes. So sorry, you capture this incredible moth, and you measured its sort of sound properties with and without the fluff, as it were.
00:05:45 Prof Marc Holderied
At the time, there was some indication that something might be going on, but our technique and my control over this wasn’t quite there. So basically, on and off, I’ve worked on this project ever since. And at the core of this was developing a tool, a research tool, which is one-of-a-kind globally.
00:06:02 Prof Marc Holderied
It’s called an acoustic tomograph. So it’s a machine I can put any organism in it, and then I send ultrasound from many different directions, and I can measure and build an echo image of the object. Very much like a bat does. But now we’ve got these 3D images, so it’s pretty stunning to see an image emerge from sound waves.
00:06:24 Prof Marc Holderied
And that allowed us to then finally go and revisit that original idea. So I hired somebody who is the world’s expert in shaving moths now, to do this in a systematic way. And this is when we made our discovery that something truly remarkable is going on on the wings of these moths.
00:06:44 Prof Michelle Barbour
So park that cliffhanger, just for a moment. Tell me this. You were a PhD student in Costa Rica with your then supervisor
00:06:50 Prof Michelle Barbour
was the observation you made of the moth and the sort of very initial experiment you made, was that part of your PhD? Was that the substance of what you were supposed to be doing as a PhD student? Or was this sort of a peripheral interest?
00:07:02 Prof Marc Holderied
I think this was more like total serendipity. So my project my PhD project was actually on tracking flying bats.
00:07:11 Prof Marc Holderied
OK, so very different views, and I was there only to help them measure echoes of flowers, which I’ve worked on and published on, but I was not topic of my PhD.
00:07:20 Prof Marc Holderied
Then finding that moth just it happened. You have got a couple of hours free on a day and that was the side project I chose to work on.
00:07:27 Prof Michelle Barbour
Side projects, side quests, I would say quest. Because after 30 years you said you said it so I’ll use it though this is this is you’ve never been able to quite let go of it. This observation you made you needed to scratch that itch. You needed to understand what was going on.
00:07:41 Prof Marc Holderied
Absolutely.
00:07:42 Prof Michelle Barbour
OK, so I’ve kept the listener waiting long enough. So what was it that was happening on these, on the surface of these moths’ bodies?
00:07:49 Prof Marc Holderied
You have to think about a moth as being under constant threat from many different predators.
00:07:56 Prof Marc Holderied
And as night flying insect, for those, bats, echolocating bats, of course, are the main biological threat. Now, moths don’t want to be caught by bats, so evolution has equipped them with a whole range of different defences. And one that we discovered, now, I’d say seven years ago, is an acoustic invisibility cloak.
00:08:18 Prof Marc Holderied
So a bat depends on the echoes that are reflected off the insect prey to find the prey and then catch it. Now an acoustic invisibility cloak works by receiving the sound that the bats sends there, the ultrasonic echolocation calls.
00:08:32 Prof Marc Holderied
But not reflecting them back, but rather absorbing them – hence acoustically invisible. Now this (absorbing unwanted sounds) is something that we do in our offices when we have noise control, sound absorbers. But for the moth the challenge is that these sound absorbers need still to allow the moth to fly.
00:08:54 Prof Michelle Barbour
Exactly. You think about the sort of things you’d have in an office environment or I’m thinking of the of the ceiling of a big concert venue where you don’t want echoes, but they’re not exactly applicable to moth scale, right? These things need to be able to move. And, as you say, fly.
00:09:08 Prof Marc Holderied
Absolutely. And the big challenge is the thickness of your absorber. So if you want to absorb a sound, you have to have a certain thickness to make the absorber work. And what we found is that the normal absorber, and that’s in all the textbooks, needs to be about 10 per cent of the wavelength of the sound it’s designed to absorb.
00:09:28 Prof Marc Holderied
That means there is a lowest frequency absorber can absorb. If the frequency gets lower, the wavelength gets longer and that absorber becomes inefficient.
00:09:39 Prof Michelle Barbour
So if this were applicable to moths, if evolution hadn’t stepped in, I’m assuming it has,
00:09:44 Prof Michelle Barbour
what would the thickness of the sound absorbing coating on the moth need to be? If a moth is, I don’t know, a few centimeters across, how thick would that need to be?
00:09:53 Prof Marc Holderied
So the to give you an idea. So if you think of a of a moth, you’re probably thinking about something very furry.
00:09:57 Prof Marc Holderied
Definitely more furry than a butterfly would be. And that fur on the body is also a sound absorber. That’s a normal traditional sound absorber. It’s about 1.5 millimeters thick.
00:10:08 Prof Marc Holderied
And that’s about as thin as it can get for the frequencies for the wavelengths that it needs to work. So that’s cool. But that’s 1.5 millimeter on all surfaces. So for a wing, that would mean a wing that has a total of 3 millimetre thick scales up to the wing tip.
00:10:14 Prof Michelle Barbour
That’s a fat heavy wing.
00:10:27 Prof Marc Holderied
Fat heavy wing, absolutely.
00:10:28 Prof Marc Holderied
Aerodynamically impossible to work. So evolution had to find a solution for that problem and had to design something that’s much thinner.
00:10:37 Prof Marc Holderied
And evolution being the fantastic inventor that it is, of course it found a way to make it thinner. And it achieved something that’s about 10 times better than what we could do before. And it’s to get a bit technical – it has evolved the only known acoustic metamaterial that we know exists in nature.
00:10:57 Prof Marc Holderied
Now, a metamaterial is something very exotic. Metamaterials are very powerful. They can do the most amazing things. They help us in our smartphones. They help us in medical imaging. They have all sorts of uses and they work by putting many different components together in a special arrangement.
00:11:19 Prof Marc Holderied
And by interacting and by working together they create something that is more than the sum of their contribution. We’re talking about emergent properties, very exotic emergent properties often. And in this case that lent itself to design very powerful but ultra-thin sound absorbers. As I said, 10 times thinner than anything that current technology has on offer.
00:11:44 Prof Michelle Barbour
So if I’ve understood you correctly, the differentiation between just a material, the stuff that we make stuff out of and a metamaterial is, I think you’re saying, it’s a material that derives its properties not just from what it’s made out of, but its physical structure, the way it is put together, the shape, the form, is that fair?
00:12:03 Prof Marc Holderied
Absolutely. Yeah. So it’s hard to come up with a with an easy image to show what’s going on, but structural colour often also found on the wings of butterflies. So when you’ve got these shiny, iridescent wings, which change colour as you move them, that’s a typical metamaterial. So there are structures in there that are at the range of the wavelengths,
00:12:24 Prof Marc Holderied
and they create these interference colors. That is something the individual reflector wouldn’t do, but put them in the right spatial arrangement, you get these emergent properties. And in our example it’s just super powerful absorption.
00:12:37 Prof Michelle Barbour
Brilliant. So what an amazing discovery. What an amazing project to give to your colleague or your PhD student who is able to investigate this really thoroughly. The ‘world expert in moth shaving’ which I just want to see that line on someone’s CV.
00:12:46 Prof Michelle Barbour
That’s amazing. So I can see how you could very easily have written some really great research papers, probably found some sort of follow-on investigations to do, with students to explore this in maybe related species and so on.
00:13:01 Prof Michelle Barbour
And chances are you did that. But you’ve also decided to take it in a sort of entrepreneurial direction. So talk me through that. What inspired you to do that? Were you looking for an entrepreneurial sort of project or was this how did this emerge talking of emergent properties?
00:13:16 Prof Marc Holderied
So thinking about what drives me as a researcher, I’m a curiosity driven researcher. I like to understand how things work. But at the same time my biggest motivator is to do something with these discoveries.
00:13:30 Prof Marc Holderied
To make sure that we are not missing out on not taking all the amazing lessons that nature has on offer and turning them to our advantage. That means as far as biologists goes, I’m very much an engineering-minded biologist always having this drive to design bio-inspired solutions that help us.
00:13:51 Prof Marc Holderied
So that’s my dream. That we show how nature helps us and thereby increase the appreciation by humankind, of what nature is and why we should care about it much more than we currently do.
00:14:06 Prof Michelle Barbour
Fantastic and when evolution has spent millennia, more than millennia, millions of years designing and discovering structures and perfecting and honing them, why shouldn’t we
00:14:16 Prof Michelle Barbour
Like actually really understand that and then see where it’s applicable to others of our needs? Now we don’t need acoustic invisibility cloaks as such, or at least most of us don’t.
00:14:26 Prof Michelle Barbour
But there are lots of applications for the sound absorbing materials that you’ve sort of gone on to discover and or develop I should say. So talk us through those. We all know there are lots of hazards in the world. If you ask somebody to name the top five, sound might not be in them. So what is it that you’re, what are the problems you’re trying to solve with your materials?
00:14:48 Prof Marc Holderied
So now we know that the moths do this, that they are 10 times more powerful sound absorbers, the first step was we had to translate it to wavelengths than we care about. Stuff that we can hear. We’ve done that, and now we can absorb sound much better. One of the products we were floating out there is something called acoustic wallpaper, something that’s so thin that you would be prepared to put it in your living room.
00:15:09 Prof Marc Holderied
And it would help you with living a quieter and healthier life. So, but what’s the actual use for this?
00:15:22 Prof Marc Holderied
So when we talk to people about this in many different sectors, everybody who has to control noise, be it engine noise or noise in an office or the noise in a music theatre, you mentioned concert halls – same thing. Everybody is looking for thinner and lighter, better solutions, because it reduces the weight.
00:15:41 Prof Marc Holderied
Think about an airplane, keeping a less noisy airplane comes with a fuel cost. So if you can have a lighter sound absorber, it’s becoming ecologically less polluting,
00:15:50 Prof Marc Holderied
just by replacing it with a lighter sound absorber. Or you can invest the same weight and make it quieter. I always find planes way too noisy.
00:16:00 Prof Michelle Barbour
And is this in the plane or from the ground? Listen to the plane going ahead. Where is the application in planes?
00:16:00 Prof Marc Holderied
So the stuff that I’m talking about now, was in the cabin, so trying to keep the cabin quieter.
00:16:09 Prof Michelle Barbour
- Yeah.
00:16:21 Prof Marc Holderied
But the same applies to containing the noise that the engines produce, by either directing them in a direction that we want them, or absorbing them in the hull off the plane so they there is less of a nuisance. There’s a lot of research, a lot of money going into this.
00:16:25 Prof Marc Holderied
So to cut this long story short, everybody working with sound would love to have a better solution, a thinner solution. And to put it into something that we might relate to, sound man-made noise pollution is a substantial health risk.
00:16:46 Prof Marc Holderied
Actually, it’s the second biggest environmental health risk we are exposed to. We all are exposed to sound much higher than we would have been in pre-industrial age, well over the half of us live now in urban environments that number is going to increase to over 2/3 of us by 2050.
00:17:04 Prof Marc Holderied
And in these urban environments, you’re exposed to harmful levels of noise. Continuously or at certain intervals. And they always have a negative health impact. That health impact can be measured. It has an economic impact and it also has a personal impact.
00:17:24 Prof Marc Holderied
So on a societal level, if you’re thinking about how much it costs the UK to deal with the damage done by noise – and at some many different levels. That’s hearing loss, but that’s only one aspect. It’s stress related problems, cardiovascular, pregnancy. All of these contribute. Stress levels that lead to inability to work that is measured
00:17:47 Prof Marc Holderied
at £25 billion every year. Just noise related costs, societal cost. Another example traffic noise. Just road noise cost society more than all the road accidents taken together.
00:18:01 Prof Michelle Barbour
I find that phenomenal. I really do. You feel that this is widely known about? I feel like we don’t see this in headlines.
00:18:10 Prof Marc Holderied
So planners will know this. So if you’ve got road planners, they know what they should do to keep the motorway noise out of urban areas. So on the motorways we increasingly see these sound absorbing walls being set up alongside the motorway.
00:18:22 Prof Michelle Barbour
Yes. Yeah, true. Yeah.
00:18:25 Prof Marc Holderied
Where there’s urban areas. But in the city itself, where there’s a lot of road noise of course, we can’t do this.
00:18:30 Prof Marc Holderied
We don’t have the space to put up these sound panels, and we are lacking solutions that would work. So it would be great if we could just soundproof all the windows. They get very heavy and very expensive, such that mainly big motorway-sided hotels can afford them. But wouldn’t it be great if everybody could afford a sound absorber that keeps the noise out?
00:18:50 Prof Marc Holderied
And that is one of the promises that we are trying to deliver on.
00:19:01 Prof Michelle Barbour
I just think it’s absolutely startling the figures you’re given are the damage that noise does, and I wonder, I suppose, you know, you compare it to the road traffic accidents. It’s clear that now it’s idea, it’s just very visible. It’s very obvious. But I wonder if it’s just a sort of chronic and almost invisible impact of the noise that’s that happens over a long period of time that people just don’t recognize it for the detrimental effect on our lives that it really is.
00:19:23 Prof Marc Holderied
I think we have a bit of catching up to do. So there is an under-appreciation of just how damaging the day-to-day noises are that we are exposing ourselves to.
00:19:32 Prof Michelle Barbour
Fantastic. So you have identified – and not you alone, many people have identified the detrimental effects that noise has within cities and other environments. And you’ve got these moths with these incredible metamaterials on their wings that evolution has provided to them. And now to us. So join the two. How did you go about taking inspiration from the moth?
00:19:52 Prof Michelle Barbour
I’m guessing, you know, this isn’t sort of ‘101 Dalmatians’, where you just going to breed all the moths and then stitch the wings together. So there’s some kind of like conversion of what do we need to keep of this material and what can be changed to be something that we can actually produce at scale?
00:20:01 Prof Marc Holderied
Absolutely. So that that the first thing you need to do is understand the fundamental principle. And then, as with everything in biology, nothing is there with only one purpose.
00:20:13 Prof Marc Holderied
Everything in evolution has multiple purposes. So the next step was trying to drop features. Trying to work out Occam’s Razor. What’s the absolute bare essential?
00:20:24 Prof Michelle Barbour
The minimum viable product from an evolutionary point of view.
00:20:29 Prof Marc Holderied
Exactly. And that process took us some time and some funding. So, in total we were talking about seven years of fundamental research and by the end of this, we had the fundamental principle cracked. We knew how to replicate it and that allowed us to scale up to create dimensions to fit the greater wavelength that we as humans care about.
00:20:51 Prof Michelle Barbour
Fantastic. So there’s even once you have this idea of the application, the commercial possibilities of material, there is still seven years of academic research to do. And I think that that requires real staying power.
00:21:04 Prof Michelle Barbour
I think sometimes people think commercialization is quicker than research. Just quickly. Just get something out there and start selling it to people. And this is a really good highlight of how that’s often, almost always I would say, not true. But you have this end in mind. You had this addressing the problems of noise in mind.
00:21:21 Prof Michelle Barbour
So having cracked that, you then got to the point where not the research was done. The research has never done, but the key parts of the research were pinned down. Research funding is research. So where does one go? As an academic when what one wants to do is a little bit beyond research and into what sometimes we call it technology readiness levels. Sometimes we call other things, but.
00:21:42 Prof Michelle Barbour
Where? How do you get the support? Because the research funding dries up at a point and you need some way to move it to the next stage.
00:21:48 Prof Michelle Barbour
So what was that next stage?
00:21:49 Prof Marc Holderied
OK, so that is clearly the critical transition moment. You could call it a career pivot moment. So for me this came.
00:21:59 Prof Marc Holderied
As you said, when research funding dried up, I had big plans to get European EIC funding, which was at the interface to commercialization. And I still don’t know why, but we didn’t get it. So that means I had a team, I had a fantastic machinery running and I had this desire to commercialize it. And while I wanted to keep.
00:22:20 Prof Marc Holderied
It a balance between research and then let the commercializing commercialization aspect grow more steadily. That was the trigger moment to say, OK, let’s just go full steam ahead with commercialization and this is when I discovered that Bristol-based impact commercialisation ecosystem.
00:22:39 Prof Marc Holderied
Is a fantastic research, a fantastic environment to be in. So within three months I have managed to raise enough tech transfer impact acceleration funding to continue my research for a further two years and that comes from a wide range of different sources, so.
00:22:58 Prof Marc Holderied
For starters, very important for myself was I
00:23:01 Prof Marc Holderied
was an enterprise fellow in 2023, one of the first ones inaugural, and that helped me massively. Maybe we can talk about that a bit later, but I also got a lot of funding from something called the EPSRC Impact Accelerator award. That’s money that is given by the government via EPSRC
00:23:22 Prof Marc Holderied
to the universities to allocate to project.
00:23:25 Prof Marc Holderied
And I’m incredibly grateful to the team who does this allocation because I got very substantial support over the last two years. I also reached out for other commercialisation headed funding streams. That is one from the BBSRC called the Follow-on Fund, which we have and which we are employing people on right now.
00:23:45 Prof Marc Holderied
And right now, last week we submitted another application for these sort of commercialisation bridging grants called the UKRI proof of concept call a very new approach and a very new concept.
00:23:58 Prof Marc Holderied
Also, lots of other financial support, for example from the BBI here at the University of Bristol. But last but not least, immense support from our own Division of Research, Enterprise and Innovation (DREI), they are a fantastic bunch. They have been super supportive both in in kind.
00:24:17 Prof Marc Holderied
Support by having their team members join us in our development journey advise us they’ve provided us with business advisors, they’ve helped us with the patenting cost. We’ve got a patent by now on this technology.
00:24:31 Prof Marc Holderied
And in general I could not have done anything, or at least not at the speed that we have been doing it without massive, massive impact for them. So if you’re thinking about commercialising, talk to them as soon as you can and the more you talk, the more you learn and they’re always happy to help and support.
00:24:51 Prof Michelle Barbour
That’s wonderful to hear and I too have been supported by the teams you mentioned. I couldn’t agree more. They have incredible skills, amazing skills. I’m preaching to the converted here. You’re taking a journey and doing it extremely successfully, but some of our colleagues would be less
00:25:04 Prof Michelle Barbour
open to these sorts of experiences.
00:25:07 Prof Michelle Barbour
I think I perceive a couple of main barriers and I’ll be really interested if you if you agree or if you think there are different barriers or whatever it might.
00:25:13 Prof Michelle Barbour
Be I think.
00:25:14 Prof Michelle Barbour
One is, as established academics, which I would describe you and I slightly different degrees. I think we trade on our expertise. You know, we are experts. We stand up at conferences and we we sort of talk about our research and.
00:25:28 Prof Michelle Barbour
And so forth. If we’re taking a direction into commercialization for most of us, we are completely clueless. We don’t know what to do. Some of the labor is unfamiliar. All the acronyms don’t make any sense. You have to go back to, you know, 101, you know, absolute basics of some of this terminology. And that takes, I think that requires a sort of courage and humility.
00:25:50 Prof Michelle Barbour
That is really uncomfortable when what your stock in trade is your expertise. So I think that that needs to be uninformed and be a be a baby when it comes to these skills. I think as a barrier for some people, the other one I think is almost quite different which.
00:26:08 Prof Michelle Barbour
I perceive that sometimes there’s a feeling that if somebody pops a head above the parapet and mentions to somebody from our commercialization, our impact teams, I’ve got this idea. I found this thing, I’ve developed this widget, whatever it might be, that you’re almost you. You stand standing on the edge of a precipice, and if you put a foot over, that’s it, you’re gone, you’re going down and slow and right. There’s nothing you can do. It’s out of your control. It’s out of your hands.
00:26:29 Prof Michelle Barbour
And who knows what terrible uses your innovation might be put to, you know, so there’s the sort of irreversibility of that step or the fact that step exposes you as being an engineer and being uninformed. Those are what I perceive to be barriers. I mean, would you agree or?
00:26:46 Prof Marc Holderied
Absolutely. So I think you describe the situation you’ll find yourself. I mean, you’re first. Seriously.
00:26:50 Prof Marc Holderied
Considering this pretty well, so you know nothing, everything is new and everything is. I’d say even contrary.
00:26:57 Prof Marc Holderied
To what you’ve been taught and what your successful strategies were so far, let me elaborate. So the for us is academics, the biggest motto is publish or perish. If we’ve got the most amazing story, but we can’t get it out there, that’s nothing. It counts for nothing. We haven’t done our job. If you want to commercialize something, the prerogative is the opposite.
00:27:12 Prof Michelle Barbour
You might as well not have done it, yeah.
00:27:18 Prof Marc Holderied
Your mouth shut. Don’t talk about your amazing invention up to the moment when you’ve got the IP protected.
00:27:25 Prof Marc Holderied
And I learned that the hard way. So the first time I reached out to our brilliant IP team, I told them the story. They were very exciting, I said. And here are all the papers to support this, at which point they turned away. Yeah, and told me, well, go out there, create new IP and then we can talk again. So three years later, I return. And this is what this all is being based on. So.
00:27:39
Yeah.
00:27:45 Prof Marc Holderied
If you’re serious about this, with everything you do, that’s even an interview. That’s a talk, a poster. Make sure that you’re not giving away something that then somebody could use as existing previous open knowledge that you then can’t patent protect anymore. So that’s the first biggest step.
00:28:04 Prof Marc Holderied
That was a hindrance. First a training hindrance I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to do this. I was told to do something different before and it’s also an emotional hindrance. You’re going against your instincts. You’re not supposed to not talk about what you do. So that’s one.The other the precipice. Yes, there is this one. But as soon as you take the first step, that goes away.
00:28:25 Prof Marc Holderied
Because everything depends on your decisions. So it’s not like a like this downfall like on this slide where everything happens by itself. You have to make decisions. You are in full control of this.
00:28:39 Prof Marc Holderied
And by the way, if you, if you’re publishing some things you have no control over who might be using it for whatever purpose, so actually commercialising it yourself, you’re in much more control. If you’re concerned about abuse for lack of a better word of the invention that you’ve made. So to me, the step in was triggered by the lack of money.
00:29:00 Prof Marc Holderied
So I have to admit that, and I had this moment when I said, let’s just let go. Let this live its own life. It was great while it lasted.
00:29:08 Prof Marc Holderied
But I knew that I would feel regret for the rest of my life.
00:29:12 Prof Marc Holderied
At this lump off this raw diamond in my hand and not doing something for the fear of entering the world of commercialisation, just felt so wrong. And overcoming that took a bit of courage and convincing. But for the last 2 1/2 years I’ve had an amazing learning curve, met so many amazing people.
00:29:33 Prof Marc Holderied
There’s a completely different world out there of exciting people that can inspire you and I think personally building these connections, meeting these people.
00:29:43 Prof Marc Holderied
And learning all these skills has been the most rewarding part of this and going back to 2 ½ years ago, I still think that I know very, very little of that world out there and I’ve got a long way to go, but this is just what it takes to get a company off the ground. Some of might be faster. We have been at it for.
00:30:02 Prof Marc Holderied
2 1/2 years.
00:30:03 Prof Marc Holderied
But, but that is largely down to the fact that our invention is what we might call it a platform invention, where there’s so many different uses. And that means before you take a stab or take some big decisions, you want to make sure you covered all your bases. So the planning and the setting up take.
00:30:20 Prof Marc Holderied
Longer than if you’ve got a product rather than a platform and that is what I had to learn. And yeah, I’ve got a lot of motivation and drive to do this and a.
00:30:30 Prof Michelle Barbour
Fantastic team to do it with. Yeah. It’s wonderful to hear. It really is. And there’s lots of things I want to explore. One is, as I’ve understood, it’s you are working towards your spin out company and what will certainly come on to that in a moment.
00:30:41 Prof Michelle Barbour
But you’re still a researcher. You still have a research group. You still have students, postdoctoral research, and so on. But their environment has changed because you have learned and changed your environments. So do you see that it has an impact, positive, negative or otherwise, on the people who?
00:30:57 Prof Michelle Barbour
Sort of look up to you as their supervisor, their, their boss, their PI. Are they seeing things they wouldn’t have seen otherwise? What? And what emotions they elicit? Are they fascinated? Horrified?
00:31:08 Prof Michelle Barbour
Perplexed?
00:31:09 Prof Marc Holderied
Yeah, absolutely. I think my the way I run my research team and in check my experiences into our wider postgrad community have definitely changed. So I’m invited to talk about commercialisation on a regular basis and I’m sure you doing
00:31:24 Prof Marc Holderied
this and you can you can see that in the academic audience there’s a divide. You can see some that are proper curiosity, different scientists. Well, therefore the fundamental science and that’s it. They don’t want to take that extra step and then.
00:31:41 Prof Marc Holderied
You quickly you can pick out the ones that actually have this
00:31:45 Prof Marc Holderied
commercial spark that wants to pick up on this and then want.
00:31:48 Prof Marc Holderied
to do what I want to do.
00:31:49 Prof Marc Holderied
So, I have this dream of giving something back, making a career beyond creating knowledge. It’s like creating products, creating something bigger, and give something back.
00:32:00 Prof Marc Holderied
And I find that interesting, and that has changed trying to find the people that are good for this and trying to inspire them. My, the students that I sent out all over the world, I think it’s a long shot for them to look into commercialisation, but I’ve got some projects where we develop remote sensing technologies where we connect the microphone.
00:32:20 Prof Marc Holderied
To a solar panel up in the Lake District and just listening to what’s going on there on the soundscape and one fantastic project we have at the moment is on red and grey squirrel interactions where the greys were just moving into a forest that we were
00:32:36 Prof Marc Holderied
observing and with our remote listening, we then saw that the greys were going in and then they were being pushed back by the rats again.
00:32:44
Wow.
00:32:45 Prof Marc Holderied
And when we looked closer, we saw that something remarkable happened from further North, from Scottish populations. pine martens had moved into that forest, and amazingly, the pine martens
00:32:56 Prof Marc Holderied
Feed exclusively, not exclusively, but mainly catch grey squirrels, and the red squirrels are unaffected. So basically, by teaming up with the large pine marten as a predator, now the reds have a fighting chance. I do hope that coming from the North that wave of pushback will roll over us.
00:33:17 Prof Michelle Barbour
I love it. There’s a Pixar film in there. The pine martens is the red squirrels bodyguards. I just. I, yeah, absolutely. That’s incredible to hear.
00:33:24 Prof Michelle Barbour
So, OK, so many things to explore. You mentioned alongside the fantastic support you’ve had from our teams in our research enterprise and innovation division and the various funding points you mentioned. You were, as you said, one of my inaugural enterprise fellows. Tell me a little bit about what that provided for you because you had other means of support. So did that.
00:33:44 Prof Michelle Barbour
add value?
00:33:45 Prof Michelle Barbour
What did it do that was differentiated?
00:33:48 Prof Marc Holderied
OK, so the Enterprise Fellowship gave me a lot of things. So first of all, it gave me a title and a proud title to wear. I still very, very proudly.
00:33:57 Prof Marc Holderied
It gave me some buyout money, so it gave me a bit of teaching relief. Even so, that was slightly delayed because of the short turnaround times and it gave me some money to spend on this 12-month period. So that’s the hard return that you got, but much more important is the community it created. So it wasn’t just me. There was a cohort of enterprise fellows.
00:34:20 Prof Marc Holderied
We came together regularly. We quickly bonded. We I’ve got very good friends out of that phase out of that cohort.
00:34:27 Prof Marc Holderied
And there was this. Wow. It’s us. We’re doing this now. That whole feeling of starting in new directions for us, pioneering and laying some roots for future generations and that that whole experience was very rewarding in itself. And I.
00:34:47 Prof Marc Holderied
I love attending events like the Festival of Enterprise. We had one yesterday.
00:34:52 Prof Marc Holderied
Very inspiring and inspired people there, so it’s exactly the sort of community and ecosystem we want to provide. And it’s great to be a part of it and to have maybe helped a little bit to shape it.
You certainly have. My goodness, absolutely. And I’m very grateful for that. And the, the way you describe it is wonderful to me
00:35:12 Prof Michelle Barbour
because that’s exactly the sort of thing I hoped it would do. And another thing that I was interested to see with the Enterprise Fellowship sort of program was
00:35:20 Prof Michelle Barbour
I one person and we’ve got 9000 staff and as you rightly say, some researchers will never want to do that and
00:35:27 Prof Michelle Barbour
that’s
00:35:28 Prof Michelle Barbour
fine. I am not looking to convert everyone to this kind of pathway in their career, but there are there are those people out there that have that spot that just needs to be kindled, whether they know it or not. They have that spark.
00:35:39 Prof Michelle Barbour
But what I find and it’s logical, it’s obvious I suppose. If you think about it that I can’t go and talk to all of these people. A) there’s only one of me in 9000 of them. But B)
00:35:49 Prof Michelle Barbour
I don’t always have the the authenticity, the resonance. I know what I know and I don’t know much about a lot of disciplines in the university. So for me to say, hey, this is great. She try. It’s really exciting, you know, it’s not going to resonate with everybody. But when somebody that you share an office with or you teach alongside or that you just see in the coffee queue in your
00:36:08 Prof Michelle Barbour
department is doing something in entrepreneurial direction. I always hoped it would almost have like a little bit of a ripple effect. Not that it would convert everybody to that direction, but that even those researchers who didn’t want to do it would see the value, see the point of it, see that it’s something that’s valid for an academic to do. Have you? You can say no. But have you observed anything of that nature?
00:36:27 Prof Marc Holderied
So what I observed over these past few years is I think there’s a gradual change in attitude, maybe even culture where people are aware that this is part of what an academic’s life can be.
00:36:42 Prof Marc Holderied
It’s optional as you said, not everybody has to do it, but I see an increased awareness of this. I’ve been invited to early career events where I talk to how my journey was and tried to inspire them to actually take the step. That’s something new that wasn’t there before and the numbers are growing for these events. So that clearly we are providing
00:37:02 Prof Marc Holderied
something that wasn’t provided before, so obviously we can’t one to one talks and train everybody, but we can work towards a culture change and that requires a bit of infrastructure, continuity, like this podcast? Definitely a part of that culture change and then some role models. Some people that can serve as an inspirational journey or at the commercially valuable journey to inspire others to follow in their footsteps. And if us, as a cohort or
00:37:36 Prof Marc Holderied
cohorots of enterprise fellows can serve in that role. That would be fantastic.
00:37:40 Prof Michelle Barbour
Brilliant enough. Well, yeah, I certainly hope you can.
00:37:43 Prof Michelle Barbour
OK, so back to your journey back to your technology derived from moth wings and now scales and you’re looking at all the many, many potential applications. So I hear there’s spin out companies sort of waiting to come out of the wings. So tell me about it. I think you have to announce the name, it’s not.
00:38:02 Prof Michelle Barbour
my place. But tell me about your
00:38:03 Prof Michelle Barbour
company and your hopes and plans for it.
00:38:06 Prof Marc Holderied
Excellent. So yes, of course, as being a university researcher, the route to commercialise your invention, your.
00:38:13 Prof Marc Holderied
research is through spin out company, a university spin out, and we’ve chosen a name. They’re going to be called Atticus Acoustics. Atticus is the genus of moths, it’s the largest moth in the world. And that’s one of the species that we have discovered this invisibility cloak on. It’s also beautiful and it features in our logo and everything
00:38:31 Prof Michelle Barbour
Incredible. You’ve given them off, the credit, you know you haven’t sort of.
00:38:34 Prof Michelle Barbour
stolen the moth’s thunder. I like it.
00:38:35 Prof Marc Holderied
Absolutely they are giving back. It’s not us creating this from scratch, so Atticus Acoustic is the name. Mm-hmm. We’ve got a website, we’ve got emails. We’ve got an infrastructure there. We’ve got a team we’ve got.
00:38:46 Prof Marc Holderied
patent. We’ve got a university that is massively supportive. We haven’t spun out for a number of reasons. This will happen in the first half of 2026 and we are working. We’ve got a plan that we’re implementing to do all the steps. So we are ready for this because once you step out from under this fantastic umbrella that the university is providing.
00:39:07 Prof Marc Holderied
then you have to be able to fend for yourself, find the money, find the markets. So you want to do this, step at the right moment in time.
00:39:15 Prof Michelle Barbour
Absolutely and often
00:39:17 Prof Michelle Barbour
not a heeded warning. I think some people are in such a hurry to spin that they do it too soon or sometimes delay out of a sense of, I don’t know, fear, trepidation and miss an opportunity. So that’s something I really applaud.
00:39:35 Prof Michelle Barbour
You mentioned team, so I mean clearly you are someone with many, many skills and more skills than you had a few years ago because of all the journey you’ve gone through. But what- how have you identified what you need in that team? I’m not sureit’s immediately obvious to us as researchers,
00:39:52 Prof Michelle Barbour
we know what skills we don’t have. We don’t what skills we need. So how are
00:39:55 Prof Michelle Barbour
you building that?
00:39:57 Prof Marc Holderied
That I think that is the most important question, I think to me personally for building our team, building our company, that’s the one that I’m spending most time on at the moment. I could, I could summarise it as finding the C in academics. Of course it’s the second letter in the world, but that’s not the point.
00:40:15 Prof Marc Holderied
The C roles for the company, so the CEO, the CTO, they require a very specific skill set and it’s very hard to find that without a lot of exposure. So, and sometimes people with the best intentions start on their journey and at some point realize that it’s not for them.
00:40:37 Prof Marc Holderied
and it’s better to realize that than to be honest with yourself.
00:40:41 Prof Marc Holderied
Even if it sets back the project rather than sets somebody up who doesn’t enjoy it as well as he should, he or she should to take on that role. So at the moment I’m on the hunt for a couple of Cs and jobads will go up within the next week to recruit some people who, if they want to, can transfer With that whole project from the university and then next year transfer over into the company.
00:40:56 Prof Michelle Barbour
That’s really exciting.
00:41:01 Prof Marc Holderied
00:41:07 Prof Michelle Barbour
And you say and I completely agree that they need a specific skill set. Do you know what that skill set is? I mean, you say the job ads about to go live so perhaps you do. But when I had my own spin out journey, I don’t think I could have written down a half dozen bullet points about what I needed my CEO, my COO to do. I could now
00:41:29 Prof Michelle Barbour
but at the stage you’re at, I think if I I didn’t know, I wasn’t that clear on what
00:41:35 Prof Michelle Barbour
it was I needed.
00:41:36 Prof Marc Holderied
And I completely agree. So it’s not like a tick list where you can do the spark is something that sits in between. It’s hard to hard to put the finger on and that’s exactly what makes you the perfect CEO. People that have been in the trade for a long time probably can by interviewing you and then reading between the lines we have had.
00:41:56 Prof Marc Holderied
One panel discussion where we presented our work where some of the experienced teams said, well, this is good, but you are lacking in this and this. So I’m not going to go into
00:42:05 Prof Marc Holderied
etail
00:42:06 Prof Marc Holderied
and
00:42:07 Prof Marc Holderied
half a year later, that was almost prophetic. So they had identified the weak spot and that was the breaking point at that moment, which was a hard time for the company. We recovered. We have recovered. But yeah, you can’t pick the people you have to do the journey with them. And then if it works perfect.
00:42:25 Prof Marc Holderied
If it doesn’t.
00:42:27 Prof Marc Holderied
then you have to just look further.
00:42:30 Prof Michelle Barbour
Yeah, and having the courage to actually say this isn’t working because I have certainly seen people slog away when things aren’t working and determination and resilience are definitely important here. But so is knowing when something’s not right and needs to change. Absolutely. Fantastic. Marc. Thank you. To Marc,. forgive me, no discussion with you would be complete
00:42:49 Prof Michelle Barbour
without a conversation about that TikTok video and at this point the listeners are going to be split quite clearly into two groups. The people that go, ”Yeah, I thought when were you going to get around to that, like, come on. We need to hear about this. And the other ones going, what?” Just Google it.
00:43:04 Prof Michelle Barbour
You’ll find it. So how did that come about? Did you plan to be a social media superstar? Did you plan to be the most watched TikTok video the University of Bristol ever had? I mean, how can one plan for that? How did that come about and how was it?
00:43:17 Prof Marc Holderied
So that is such an exciting but weird journey.
00:43:24 Prof Marc Holderied
So the background for this is and the short answer is planned for it, absolutely no. So the background was two years ago I was covered by in Springwatch
00:43:35 Prof Marc Holderied
with my research. And because I was so immensely proud for that coverage, I asked our University Press department whether they would do a press release. Say, yeah, let’s do this. And they asked me to record like, a one minute video at the time and then let me start differently that the BBC have very short turnaround time. So I didn’t know whether I was on the show or our research was on the show
00:43:56 Prof Marc Holderied
until five days before.
00:43:58 Prof Michelle Barbour
Sure, cause they record a lot more than they show, so they record loads of people. Some of them may never make it onto the screen.
00:43:59 Prof Marc Holderied
That’s normal. Thanks.
00:44:04
Exactly.
00:44:05 Prof Marc Holderied
And so on. The Friday I hear about this, I talked to our brilliant media team and got a contact, a new contact. The name is Nim Jethwa and he’s now still with us and he has been a fantastic companion in this journey. So on Sunday, I was at a conference. I was at a conference for the whole week. So he made me record a one minute video for his benefit.
00:44:25 Prof Marc Holderied
And then he said on Monday. Can you do it slightly differently and do an anchor at
00:44:29 Prof Marc Holderied
he beginning so
00:44:30 Prof Marc Holderied
in the lunch break at the conference, I just stood outside and recorded a one-
00:44:34 Prof Marc Holderied
and-a-half minute thing,
00:44:36 Prof Marc Holderied
and sent it off to Nim.
00:44:37 Prof Michelle Barbour
One take no lines, no auto cues, just you and talking with your enthusiasm for your research.
00:44:39 Prof Marc Holderied
Not script ed
00:44:41 Prof Marc Holderied
I just explained that,
00:44:44 Prof Marc Holderied
aAnd I provided a lot of materials and I thought he would use that as a trigger to sort of write his press release and then put some media on there. And I forgot about it. Three days later, I come back from the conference and Nim and his team had worked his magic, or their magic, put it on all the different social media channel, and it was trending everywhere.
00:45:03 Prof Marc Holderied
I came back a social media phenomenon.
00:45:08 Prof Marc Holderied
So the at the time we had racked up a couple 100,000 views and it kept going and the highest number we had in the end was TikTok. We had 1.2 million viewers after less than a month.
00:45:20 Prof Michelle Barbour
Phenomenal on research like research isn’t known for being a TikTok phenomenon like it really isn’t. It’s incredible.
00:45:28 Prof Marc Holderied
Took us by complete surprise. I think it was just a combination of this very inspiring story and a very unlikely connection between moths
00:45:36 Prof Marc Holderied
and our personal health and well-being and it just I think all the stars aligned to make this happen and it was a fantastic journey for a couple of weeks. I was a TikTok addict watching my viewer numbers rise and rise. And that was great. And I think for over a year, this was the most watched researchcontent
00:45:56 Prof Marc Holderied
in the UK, ever, I think I might still hold that record.
00:46:00 Prof Marc Holderied
But now the university at least has a non-research content that had more viewers on the on the university account. But still this is a remarkable achievement that I’m still not sure I fully deserve, but I enjoyed that so much.
00:46:13 Prof Michelle Barbour
It’s an incredible achievement and it’s one to enjoy, I think, and not think of deserve. I agree. It was an amazing story. It is an amazing story and the link between moths
00:46:22 Prof Michelle Barbour
and our health is not an obvious one. And therefore an intriguing one. I also just think that’s why I asked if you did it in a single take without lines and so on, is there was
00:46:30 Prof Michelle Barbour
-I watched that video lots of times- there was a
00:46:32 Prof Michelle Barbour
wonderful charm of your entire authenticity. It felt like we were just watching you talk. It didn’t feel like a presenter. It didn’t feel like a sort of public engagement in science. It felt like someone talking about something we’re really excited about and wanted to explain to a wider audience. And I think they had enormous charm and authenticity. So that’s my view for what it’s worth.
00:46:53 Prof Marc Holderied
Well, thanks for saying that.
00:46:54 Prof Michelle Barbour
And actually something that sometimes researchers worry about presenting their work in an accessible way. And indeed, it can be really hard and some people do need to really learn and have training to
00:47:04 Prof Michelle Barbour
do that, but there’s too much training and too much formalizing of that can actually make it quite wooden and stiff, and having that just let your excitement and your love for your work shine through is has a real place. So I think there’s a case study in there for training materials.
00:47:19 Prof Marc Holderied
So I was invited to an early careers event up in Sheffield
00:47:24 Prof Marc Holderied
earlier this year to talk about that experience and I think what you just said is pretty much summarised my take home message, right, talk about something that you’re passionate about
00:47:32 Prof Marc Holderied
don’t overdo it. Make it unpolished, make it authentic and that at least I believe has courage and the people that know a lot more about social media than I do have told me that this unpolished authenticity actually is what carries that type of video.
00:47:49 Prof Michelle Barbour
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of really polished stuff out there. I think people really appreciate that.
00:47:53 Prof Michelle Barbour
You’re seeing the outer human being and not like a product of a committee. If you see what I mean.
00:47:58 Prof Michelle Barbour
Amazing. OK, so coming back to Atticus Acoustics, we’ve, we’ve got this really exciting period of building the team of waiting till exactly the right moment to step out from the umbrella as you say and either feel the sun or the rain or probably both. You know this is Britain not just in kind of literal terms, but also in terms of as a spin out. You will feel both and the Tthunder and the lightning and the
00:48:19 Prof Michelle Barbour
snakes falling from the sky all the rest of.
00:48:20 Prof Michelle Barbour
But let’s sort of turn our eyes away from that moment a little bit, which is exciting and terrifying at the same time. Where would you like Atticus to be in a couple of years and what would you like it to have achieved in the longer term? What is the ultimate goal that you’d really like to see? What would
00:48:40 Prof Michelle Barbour
you like your sort of
00:48:41 Prof Michelle Barbour
retirement speech to deliver or something like that.
00:48:45 Prof Marc Holderied
So I think my deepest dream is to turn that discovery that invention into something that gives back. So having achieved a slight increase in health, making people’s lives quieter and healthier. So that’s my dream.
That we can achieve this somehow, but we can achieve this in many different ways and Atticus aAcoustics is our vehicle.
00:49:08 Prof Marc Holderied
Now that we are in deep discussions and have made quite a few changes into what our first market is going to be, so architectural retrofit is an important one. So rooms that are already there talking about shared offices, noisy rooms in your homes. So you put something up on the wall and that makes it a less noisy and healthier environment.
00:49:29 Prof Marc Holderied
So that of course there’s lots of solutions out there already, thankfully so, but the technology that they’re based on is all fibrous, porous absorber.
00:49:38 Prof Marc Holderied
And they are. Let’s face it, I’m a tool technology and they’re about 200 years old. So big transformative inventions are in the making in many different sectors. So we have got competitors out there, but we believe that the moths have given us an approach that nobody else can do. So what they, what they had to do is they didn’t just have to be very thin.
00:49:59 Prof Marc Holderied
Some others can be very thin, some others.
00:50:01 Prof Marc Holderied
But what most can do is they are very thin, but they are very thin and cover all the different frequencies that bats might be using, and that’s the Holy Grail. That’s the the target, Sir. And this is where you want to go. Something that is broadband and ultra-thin and that’s what the moth can do. So we will try and get
00:50:21 Prof Marc Holderied
first product range out for wall mounted or ceiling mounted sound absorbers.
00:50:27 Prof Marc Holderied
In parallel, we are in advanced stages of a co-development agreement with the aerospace sector. So we’ve got an airplane manufacturer for an airplane manufacturer who is developing quieter cabins on turboprop machines. So that’s a very specific development agreement that we’re working on.
00:50:47 Prof Marc Holderied
These two are what we are progressing on at the most at the
00:50:50 Prof Marc Holderied
moment there are obvious defence applications as well.
00:50:53
Yep.
00:50:54 Prof Michelle Barbour
Really, really exciting. And is this something you see emerging from university and you let it go, you let it fly as it were, or do you want to keep involved? Are you are you in too deep to let it go and fledge from you?
00:51:06 Prof Marc Holderied
So I’ve been thinking about my role in this for a long time and I’ve experienced myself in this journey
00:51:14 Prof Marc Holderied
and I found things that I like more than others.
00:51:18 Prof Marc Holderied
So there was a point where I could have chosen to be the CEO of this. That would mean stepping out of my role as a professor and taking on, or at least part time and taking on a more responsibility, the bigger responsibility in that company. I decided against that because to me, the professorial role
00:51:37 Prof Marc Holderied
includes interaction with students and being given the opportunity, the brilliant opportunity, the privilege to teach students that want to learn and have the opportunity to inspire them in lectures and practicals in tutorials.
00:51:53 Prof Marc Holderied
That is, I still believe one of the most rewarding parts of what I do, and I am not prepared to give that up. On the other hand, I don’t really like negotiating. I’m a cooperator, and if I’ve got somebody and I need to get some tough negotiations with her, I don’t take joy out of this. Others do so
00:52:13 Prof Marc Holderied
my decision not to take on a big C role in the company.
00:52:17 Prof Marc Holderied
I made about a year, a year and a half ago, so I see myself as creating this as a child, assembling it in the right way, and then letting it go and letting it evolve and letting it develop. Of course I’m going to be on the board, but I want others to make the decisions and let this
00:52:37 Prof Marc Holderied
child of ours grow.
00:52:37 Prof Michelle Barbour
It’s that theme of humility. And I mean kind of two things by that as well. You’ve had that that reflection that this is not necessary. Well, not just your skill set, but what you want to do, what the role you want to play.
00:52:51 Prof Michelle Barbour
There’s a flip side to it. Sometimes the academic be they an established academic yourself or a postgraduate or anything in between. Sometimes they can make an absolutely brilliant, CXO, CEO, CTO, whatever it is, and having the confidence to go well. I don’t quite know, but I’m going to give it a go is can be equally humble if you like, it’s having that
00:53:12 Prof Michelle Barbour
self-reflection and being honest with yourself about do you really want to do this? No. I want to do this thing over here. And by the way, on the students, I couldn’t agree more. It’s another reason I never left when I started my own company. Working with students is definitely one of my favourite parts of my job.
00:53:24 Prof Michelle Barbour
But there’s I do know of examples I can think of at least half a dozen of the academic who have taken that step with heart and mouth, with terror and is now doing amazing work. So there’s this open-mindedness to which is the right role and there isn’t a single model.
00:53:37 Prof Marc Holderied
Oh yeah.
00:53:42 Prof Michelle Barbour
If I had a penny for every time someone’s told me, there’s only one way that this works well, I’d have a lot
00:53:47 Prof Michelle Barbour
more pennies.
00:53:49 Prof Michelle Barbour
Great. Mark, you’ve talked with great warmth about the support you’ve had from various teams in the university and the financial support from some of the devolved funding from governments. And you’ve talked about the Bristol ecosystem and the benefits that’s brought you. But I believe you’ve also benefited from a specific government scheme called ICURe So I wonder if you could say a little bit about that.
00:54:11 Prof Michelle Barbour
W what it’s given to you and your colleagues and I guess
00:54:15 Prof Michelle Barbour
eho it’s right for.
00:54:16 Prof Michelle Barbour
What kind of researchers would benefit from this themselves?
00:54:19 Prof Marc Holderied
OK, I’m glad you’re bringing this up. So ICURe is a very well designed, powerful and effective training set of training sessions that gets you incorporation ready. So it’s multiple
00:54:35 Prof Marc Holderied
stages. Some of them are require more commitment than others, and we completed the two last stages of this. One of them called explore, the other exploit.The one explore is about finding your fit to market
00:54:47 Prof Marc Holderied
that takes three months and it pays the salary for lead entrepreneur and then the second set does the same thing. But this is then developing the framework, setting up the company, coming up with the business plan. We’ve done all this, so if you go through this process, it’s pretty much a one stop
00:55:07 Prof Marc Holderied
training to get you ready to start your own company and this has been a tough ride. You have to learn so much about the team delivering this are so knowledgeable and supportive.
00:55:20 Prof Marc Holderied
The breadth of topics covered but also the resources given will really help you get where you need to go, I can only encourage everybody to consider the ICURe training. It’s brilliant. It’s also very competitive, so make sure that you talk to your specific local tech transfer team
00:55:41 Prof Marc Holderied
on how to make a winning bid to the ICURe training.
00:55:45 Prof Marc Holderied
And overall, I think it has been the most important accelerator to all our progress. So yes, more ICURe please.
00:55:53 Prof Michelle Barbour
I couldn’t agree more. I confess I’m an ICURe graduate from right and 10 years ago when it was really new and quite different. Admittedly what I love about it is you’re right. It’s really intense. There’s a huge amount to learn.
00:56:05 Prof Michelle Barbour
It can be quite
00:56:05 Prof Michelle Barbour
sort of dizzying, almost when you realise how much there is to learn.
00:56:09 Prof Michelle Barbour
But as a founder, you got to learn that stuff. ICURe structures it makes it accessible, makes it makes sure that you have all those basics and you haven’t missed some big category of thing. You need to know about. You didn’t even really realize so that that structure also the cohort sense you talked about being part of a cohort with the Enterprise Fellowship. And I’ve really found the cohort feeling of ICURe
00:56:29 Prof Michelle Barbour
quite important cause you’re talking with other people at a similar stage of development and understanding to yourself.
00:56:34 Prof Marc Holderied
Yeah, absolutely. So this we were just shy of a dozen projects in that cohort that we went through together.
00:56:41 Prof Marc Holderied
Our team there were three our tech transfer officer who still is my partner from DREI myself as the academic lead and then the entrepreneurial lead. And that person did most of the training and there was a real sense of community that they were developing the other two being included were
00:57:01 Prof Marc Holderied
only invited to some of the events, but even we contributed to and profited from that whole feeling of community, of joint achievement. So even though in the end you’re going to compete for venture capital
00:57:13 Prof Marc Holderied
That never was felt during that training process. This was really everybody working on the same thing, having the same goal and helping each other out as a cohort.
00:57:23 Prof Michelle Barbour
And that can be so powerful. Marc, I really can’t thank you enough for your time and your insights and your warmth and enthusiasm for everything you’re doing. I guess my final question and I can’t resist it.
00:57:35 Prof Michelle Barbour
Because you started by telling me about this young PhD student out in Costa Rica working on a project and then sees moth, and can’t resist seeing what’s going on with this moth,
00:57:45 Prof Michelle Barbour
and how that’s led you and all the many, many other things you’ve done in parallel while never losing sight of that, I need to properly understand this. And then I need to find how this can benefit humankind. If you were to, if that Marc were to be able to look at this Marc and see everything you’ve done, including, but not limited to the Atticus
00:58:06 Prof Michelle Barbour
story what would he think? What would he say?
00:58:11 Prof Marc Holderied
I think I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have had the courage to embark on this journey back in the day and I think that’s probably the message here. It’s a big project. It has taken me a long time to get there, but every step was just logical and small and achievable. And I think the main driver was not to give up
00:58:30 Prof Marc Holderied
just to keep doing what you’re passionate about. And then there were times when there was no funding and we were working on other stuff, but it rethought surfaced and it stayed with me. And then you got this gut feeling that there is something to it. And this was a an amazing privilege that actually this time it came through we delivered.
00:58:50 Prof Marc Holderied
And we’re sitting here and talking about some exciting inventions that ahead of us.
00:58:56 Prof Michelle Barbour
So would young Marc be surprised that you’d overcome all those various setbacks where there was no funding where there wasn’t the time where there wasn’t opportunity would or would he go? Yeah. Damn right, that’s what I’m going to do. Because that’s the kind of person I am.
00:59:09 Prof Marc Holderied
- That’s very hard to tell about myself.
00:59:11 Prof Marc Holderied
Yeah, that I think it’s about as far from my ambition at the time than it could be.
00:59:18 Prof Michelle Barbour
Excellent, excellent. So if you were to turn the tables, if you were to put a little word in young Marc’s ear when he’s falling asleep dreaming moths. What encouragemen or warning? What would you tell him? What was the advice you’d give that
00:59:31 Prof Michelle Barbour
that young person?
00:59:32 Prof Marc Holderied
Well, if you’re convinced that it’s great, stick
00:59:35 Prof Marc Holderied
to it, even if others are not.
00:59:36 Prof Michelle Barbour
I can think of no words to add.
00:59:41 Prof Michelle Barbour
Professor Marc Holderied, my colleague and friend. I’m so grateful to you for your time. This has been a fantastic discussion and filled with humour and warmth and insight. Thank you again very much, Michelle.
00:59:51 Prof Marc Holderied
Thank you so much for having me. This was great fun indeed. And yeah, it was a privilege to be here today.
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