Andrea Rayat is Associate Professor in in Bioseparations and Downstream Processing at the Department of Biochemical Engineering at UCL. She is an associate member of the Institution of Chemical Engineers. She is the Chair of the Departmental Teaching Committee and is Programme Director of the undergraduate programme in Biochemical Engineering (BEng/MEng).

Previous and current roles:

• Faculty Education Committee (2019-present)
• Faculty Education Team (Covid Emergency Response, 2020-2021)
• Covid19 Mitigation Coordinator (2020-2021)
• BIA LeaP, BioIndustry Association Leadership Programme (2019-2021)
  
• Department Safety Committee (2017-2019)

Andrea graduated from UCL with a PhD in Biochemical Engineering (2011). Her doctoral research focussed on the establishment of microscale bioprocessing platform for the evaluation of dead-end and cross-flow filtration operations and was used to study the impact of upstream conditions on filtration performance.

After her doctoral studies, Andrea worked in various capacities as product engineer, product manager and bioprocess consultant at a technical consulting firm offering software technology solutions and technical consulting for biopharmaceutical manufacturing businesses. Andrea managed the product development cycle and continous improvement for a process modeling software for modelling and evaluating bioprocesses, equipment and facility operation, and their associated costs. She worked on projects which included manufacture siting, capacity planning and concept studies for new-build or brown-field capital projects.


Andrea re-joined UCL as HEFCE Senior Enterprise Fellow in Bioprocessing in 2014 where she worked on technology translation, knowledge exchange, and the establishment of the commercialisation pathway for the first-generation ultra scale-down devices. With Prof Gary Lye, Andrea won a grant from the EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award (2016) for the establishment of commercial-ready USD devices. As a research staff, Andrea was part of the departmental committee for post-docs which organises seminars and workshops for their career development. One of these, Ideas to Impact workshop (2017), successfully obtained funding from the UCL Staff Development Programme. In 2018, she was appointed as Lecturer in Bioseparations (Downstream Processing) and promoted to Associate Professor in 2021.


Andrea obtained her MSc in Chemical Engineering and Biochemical Engineering (cum laude) from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands where she first specialised in downstream processing. She had her BSc in Chemical Engineering from the University of the Philippines in Laguna.