Dr Menelas Nicolas Pangalos has been knighted and becomes

Mene Pangalos is a neuroscientist and a leader in the pharmaceutical industry.
As Executive Director at AstraZeneca, he has transformed their research and
development activity, raising productivity five-fold and bringing patients newlife-saving medicines in cancer, asthma, diabetes and heart disease. He has created one of the strongest innovative product pipelines in the industry and his leadership has restored AstraZeneca to the fourth largest FTSE company, leading
to a multi-million pound investment in a new research centre and global
headquarters in Cambridge.
He champions an open and transformative approach to working with academia, charity and industry partners, with over 1,000 collaborations worldwide, including a partnership with the Medical Research Council to promote the reuse of previously failed compounds through an Open Innovation portal, which supports over 250 pre-clinical projects.

He has also built partnerships with NHS Scotland, Genomics England, and accelerated the completion of UK BioBank sequencing, which is revolutionising the understanding of diseases and treatments.

He remains active in research and as
an internationally-renowned expert in drug discovery, precision medicine and
neuroscience, having published over 150 peer-reviewed articles. He is a Council
member of the Medical Research Council and a Board member of the Francis
Crick Institute, the Cambridge Judge Business School and the GapSummit (inter-
generational leadership summit in biotechnology).

Pangalos was born in Ealing, London, to a family of Greek diaspora which settled in England. Both his parents descended from the island of Chios and his mother (néePsarros[6]) was born there. His extended family on both parents sides still live in Chios and he spent childhood summers there. He is fluent in Greek.

He commenced his scientific studies with a Bachelor of Science in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (First Class Honours) from Imperial College London and a subsequent Ph.D. in Neuropharmacology from University College London.[7] His post-doctoral training was conducted under the tutelage of Prof. N. K. Robakis at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York.