The Team
Blast EcoShield came out of four years of research at Cranfield University, and the people who did that work now run the company. The rest of the team and the advisory board come from defence, engineering and business.
Dr Rachael Hazael CEng
Founder and Chief Executive
Rachael led the research behind the EcoShield and now leads the company. She is a Reader in Applied Materials at Cranfield University with more than sixty peer-reviewed publications in blast phenomena and material response, and she took her PhD in Chemistry at University College London, where the work that sits underneath all of this began.
She is a Chartered Engineer and a Member of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, and she has worked alongside specialist government agencies on safety in public spaces and critical infrastructure. That combination is unusual. Most people in this field come from the explosives side and learn the materials; Rachael came from the materials side and learned the explosives.
In 2025 she was named in the Top 50 Women in Engineering. She was shortlisted for the Women in Defence Awards in 2022 for research and innovation, and was a finalist in the Women in Engineering Awards in the safety and security category. She is the person who presents the quantitative data under non-disclosure, because she is the person who produced it.
Edward Clinton MBE CEng FIExpE
Founder and Chief Operating Officer
Ed ran the British Army's Explosive Engineers, a cadre of around four hundred and fifty specialists, and has more than twenty years in Explosive Ordnance Disposal, the disposal of unexploded bombs and devices, on operations worldwide. He was awarded the Queen's Commendation for Bravery in 2016.
He took the MSc in Explosive Ordnance Engineering at Cranfield and is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow and a board member of the Institute of Explosive Engineers. In 2024 he received the Harold Swinnerton Award for his impact on the explosives engineering industry, and in 2025 he was appointed MBE for services to bomb disposal.
He has worked with specialist agencies and international partners across the wider chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear disposal domain on capability, assurance and professional standards. At Blast EcoShield he is responsible for how a design becomes a thing that actually stands on a site, which is the part of this business where most of the risk lives.
Patrick Crosbie
Go-to-Market Lead
Patrick leads go-to-market at Blast EcoShield. He has founded three businesses, two of which were acquired, and ran the two-hundred-person group that bought the second. Across twenty years he has built the commercial side of companies in Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Australia, latterly leading a Salesforce consultancy in Dubai.
His work is how a new product reaches its market, and the sales operation and technology that carry it there. He is a certified consultant across Salesforce and 6sense, and he built the pipeline and forecasting infrastructure for a global leader in blast and force protection.
His background is commercial rather than defence or materials science. He is the first point of contact at Blast EcoShield for any sales conversation, and he brings in the rest of the team when a question needs them.
Dr Gareth Collett CBE CEng Hon FIExpE
Advisory Board
Gareth spent thirty-five years as a British Army officer and diplomat, serving in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and several theatres that are less widely reported, and rose to lead the United Kingdom's bomb disposal profession. He was appointed CBE in 2013 for life-saving work on blast mitigation in Afghanistan and for the specialist threat mitigation provided to the 2012 Olympic Games.
After leaving the Army in 2018 he spent four years as the United Nations Chief Technical Adviser on weapons abatement, working in fragile states to reduce the risk from explosive remnants of war and improvised devices, and to improve force protection. He now holds a directorship in higher education, where his work is rebuilding national capacity in the energetics industry.
He holds a Doctorate in Defence and Security, advises Action on Armed Violence and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and contributes to war crimes investigations involving explosive violence.
Susan Robson MBE
Advisory Board
Susan is Chief Executive of the Women's Engineering Society, a national organisation working on the engineering talent pipeline and on the conditions that let women build long careers in the sector. She came to it from twenty-five years in consulting, engineering and energy, with senior roles at PwC and National Grid advising on business model design, operating model change and large-scale organisational transformation.
She holds an Executive Diploma in Strategy and Innovation from Oxford's Saïd Business School. She works with policymakers on skills and inclusion, bringing industry evidence to decisions that will shape who does engineering in this country over the next twenty years.
She is a Financial Times Champion of Women in Business, was a finalist for the Sunday Times Non-Executive Director of the Year, and was appointed MBE in 2024 for services to inclusion in engineering. For a spin-out at our stage, what she brings is the operating model question: how a company like this scales without losing the thing that makes it worth scaling.
Lieutenant General Sir George Norton KCVO CBE DL
Advisory Board
Sir George was appointed Commandant of the Royal College of Defence Studies in 2020, after an Army career of thirty-eight years that ended with his appointment as the United Kingdom's senior military diplomat in Brussels.
His service was mostly operational. Twelve months in Sarajevo in the headquarters implementing the Dayton Peace Agreement. Three tours of Afghanistan, including a year as the first British Deputy Commander of the United States 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward). Repeated deployments in Northern Ireland, latterly as the first Commander of 38 (Irish) Brigade.
In 2011 he was appointed General Officer Commanding London District and Major General Commanding the Household Division. In that post he was responsible for the ceremonial military element of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and as Joint Military Commander for London he provided the Army's support to the 2012 Olympic Games. From 2013 to 2016 he was Deputy Commander of the NATO Rapid Deployable Corps in Italy, and he finished as the longest-serving British Military Representative to NATO and its final Military Representative to the European Union.
He is Deputy Chair of the National Army Museum, a Lieutenant of the Tower of London and a Deputy Lieutenant of Hertfordshire. He gardens, which given what we do is not the coincidence it sounds like.
