Dr Mackintosh has had a distinguished career in industry and investment as a former CEO of FTSE listed Oxford Instruments before later leading the creation of the Royal Society Enterprise Fund, a pioneering initiative in bringing together scientific expertise and early-stage investment. He was a board member of the Intellectual Property Office and a trustee of the Design Council and is currently chairman of Sphere Fluidics, a high-growth biotechnology tools company. He is a board member of Downing FOUR VCT plc and of ACF Investors.

He has a longstanding interest in enhancing the commercialisation and wider economic impact of UK research. From 2015 to 2021 he was a non-executive director of Ploughshare Innovations, the technology transfer organisation for the UK Ministry of Defence. In 2019 he led a Treasury project which resulted in the publication in April this year of ‘The Mackintosh Report: Getting smarter: a strategy for knowledge & innovation assets in the public sector’ and the launch of an initiative with £17m of government funding to support commercialisation of publicly owned technologies and ideas. Dr Mackintosh has a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge, is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of Hughes Hall, Cambridge and a trustee of City, University of London.