John Day has worked on applied phycological projects for >35 years and has had wide ranging experience developing algal culturing protocols for both research and commercial applications. In a previous job he led a small R&D team at Cell Systems Ltd, (Cambridge Science Park), developing culturing systems for algae to be used as “first feeds” for mollusc and shrimp larvae. This involved strain selection, medium development and the optimisation of biomass yield/ lipid production. Subsequently, he was directly responsible for the transfer of this technology to the research labs of Cultor/ Genencor International at Kantvik, Finland and scale-up to an industrial plant. He was also responsible for the development of the down-stream processing: harvesting, drying and formulation of the product. He has been the Head of CCAP since 2008 and was curator of the freshwater algal and protozoan sections of the Culture Collection of Algae and Protozoa (CCAP) since 1990. These roles involve management of the collection, provision of cultures and services to the scientific community, curation of the collection and its data, as well as research (core and contract). He coordinated an EU FP-V project on conserving biological resources for biotechnological exploitation and was a WP leader in an EU FP-V thematic network on biotechnological exploitation of algae (AlgiNet). More recently he has been working on algal biofuel projects and was a CoI in the multidisciplinary Interreg IVA funded project BioMara: Sustainable Fuels from Marine Biomass. He also led the Carbon Trust funded COG project a component of their ABC programme. He currently leads SAMS commitments to the EU KBBE funded SeaBiotech project, is a CoI on the recently initiated UK-INDIA Partnerships in Synthetic Biology Biofuels Initiatives and represents SAMS in the NW Europe project EnAlgae, developing best-practice for strain conservation to underpin a future algal biotechnology industry.