Onur Aydogan
Onur Aydogan is a Venture Manager and FinTech Stream Lead at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School for the Creative Destruction Lab. At Oxford University, Onur built the FinTech stream for Creative Destruction Lab; recruited exit entrepreneurs, investors, and industry leaders as mentors, and selected a cohort of FinTech startups from across Europe, UK, and rest of the world to benefit from the programme.
Before moving to the UK, he was mainly focused on building hardware technologies including particle detectors, 3D printers to molecular spectrometers. During this time, Onur was a research assistant at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey and had the chance to participate at CERN on the AMS-02 Dark Matter experiment; a particle physics research run in collaboration with the International Space Station.
During his time at CERN, he met with the Entrepreneur First (EF) programme and moved to the UK to join the programme where he co-founded Sanctum Technologies as Chief Technology Officer. After receiving investment from EF and University of Oxford Seed Fund, Onur delivered a contract to the Ministry of Defence through DSTL in the UK for an active noise cancellation technology for military and commercial aircraft and moved on to continue his academic studies. He holds an MSc in Atomic & Molecular Physics and a BSc in Physics.
Onur’s work in molecular physics on developing and designing a molecular spectrometer from scratch was recognised and published by CERN. Furthermore, he also worked on molecular structures of organic solar cell materials during his masters. Onur is still active at CERN; this time, as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence and mentor for CERN Entrepreneurship Student Programme (CESP) where he advises entrepreneurs every summer on how to bring CERN technologies into market. In 2017, Onur received an endorsement (given to 200 people per annum at the time) from Tech City UK for a Tier 1 Exceptional Promise visa to live and work in the UK. Last year in 2020, Onur received a Merit Award from the University of Oxford which is given to staff who have exceeded expectations by adding significant value to their team or department. This was mainly for his work in 2020, when he was part of a global new stream CDL Recovery. During the Recovery programme, his role as venture manager was searching for innovations and recruiting startups working on COVID-19 solutions.
Onur considers himself as a generalist technologist with an urge to always keep an eye on emerging technologies in various fields. He is keen to work with ventures working on challenging technologies with the potential of real impact in the world.