Ilan Gur is an American

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

and entrepreneur. In 2022 he was appointed as the chief executive officer of the UK's

Advanced Research and Invention Agency The Advanced Research and Invention Agency, or ARIA, is a research funding agency of the UK government, announced on 19 February 2021 and formally established on 26 January 2023. History The Advanced Research and Invention Agency Act 2022 cre ...

(ARIA), an independent science funding body.

Education

Gur obtained his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

from the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

Materials Science Materials science is an interdisciplinary field of researching and discovering materials. Materials engineering is an engineering field of finding uses for materials in other fields and industries. The intellectual origins of materials sci ...

and Engineering.

Career

Gur served as a Program Director and Senior Adviser for ARPA-E between 2011 and 2014. He has founded two science-based

startups A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an Entrepreneurship, entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses including self-employment and businesses tha ...

, including Seeo Inc., which was acquired by Bosch in 2015. Gur was the founder and former CEO of Activate, an innovation

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

that uses an entrepreneurial fellowship model to help

scientist A scientist is a person who Scientific method, researches to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engag ...

s and

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...

s transform their research into products and businesses. Activate's fellowship model originated at Cyclotron Road, a Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, founded by Gur in 2014. In July 2022, Gur was appointed as the inaugural CEO of the

, United Kingdom’s independent science funding body.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gur, Ilan Living people 21st-century American businesspeople Advanced Research and Invention Agency University of California, Berkeley alumni Year of birth missing (living people)