Prof Mark Gillan is Associate VP of KAUST Technologies and Special Projects, under the new National Transformation Institute.

Mark has held various engineering leadership roles within industry, Formula One, academia and the public sector.

In over a decade in F1 he ran both Jaguar/Red Bull and Williams F1 race engineering teams.  

In academia he held the inaugural Sir George Edwards Chair in Aerospace Engineering, at the University of Surrey.  As CTO of the UK’s Innovation Agency, Innovate UK, Mark ran both the Strategy and Impact and the Centres and Networks Governance Directorates, that included oversight of the UK’s extensive Catapult Network.  He was also Chief Executive of Wave Power Ltd, Chief Operations Officer for Artemis Technologies Ltd and Belfast Digital Innovation Commissioner.  

Prior to joining KAUST, Mark was Head of R&D at the UK’s National Air Traffic Services (NATS), leading on a variety of airspace projects including one of the UK’s largest funded AI projects, called BlueBird, aimed at delivering the world’s first AI system to work with air traffic controllers and control a section of airspace in live trials.

At KAUST, Mark leads the world’s largest coral reef restoration project at Shushah Island, in NEOM, KSA.  The Initiative encapsulates a range of multi-disciplinary technologies, including digital twins, AI, high performance computing, autonomous robotics, marine science, remote health monitoring and data science.

Mark is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and a Visiting Professor of both Surrey and Ulster Universities.