IQE’s CEO Drew Nelson receives Bessemer Society’s Lifetime Fellowship Award

At a dinner at the City of London Club on 20 November, Dr Drew Nelson (co-founder & CEO of epiwafer foundry and substrate maker IQE plc of Cardiff, Wales, UK) received the Lifetime Fellowship Award of the Bessemer Society from professor Sir Colin Humphreys, director of the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride and director of research in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at University of Cambridge.

Named after steel-making pioneer Sir Henry Bessemer, the Bessemer Society was founded in 2015 to provide a mutual support network for entrepreneurs who lead high-tech companies that depend on manufacturing, enabling them to meet and share information on the basis of mutual trust.

The Lifetime Fellowship Award is presented each year to an entrepreneur who has shown the qualities that reflect the ethos of the Bessemer Society: ambition, perseverance, technical acumen, social purpose, and leadership.

Following a PhD in Semiconductor Physics, Nelson joined BT Research Laboratories in 1981, leading the group responsible for the development of optoelectronic devices for fiber-optic communications. He co-founded EPI (Epitaxial Products International) in Cardiff in 1988, which in 1999 merged with Pennsylvania-based Quantum Epitaxial Designs (QED) to become IQE, when he was appointed CEO.

Since then IQE has grown to become the leading global supplier of epiwafers for compound semiconductor chips, operating manufacturing plants in the UK, USA and Asia. More recently it has established an additional foundry in Newport, in what is becoming a ‘Compound Semiconductor Valley’ in South Wales, where Nelson has encouraged linkages between companies in the local value chain and universities under the CS Connected initiative.

Tags: IQE

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Visit: www.bessemer-society.co.uk