Alan Banks
Alan Banks is the Lightweight Structures Supervisor within Innovation and Research at Ford Motor Company. He started work at Ford in 1983 as an apprentice and worked in Chassis Engineering responsible for suspension systems on commercial vehicles until 2019 before his move to Innovation and Research.
His remit with the Innovation and Research team is to lead projects with light-weighting technologies and applications in design with mass production capability. This remit includes material choices from advanced steel to full composite structures, including hybrid technology to produce the best value for automotive applications.
Alan is responsible for a team of 8 engineers with a team of distributed global engineers who help develop Test Driven Development as well as Behavioural Driven Development to ensure customer expectations are met as well as component specifications for lightweight application technology.
He was the team leader on the Composite Lightweight Automotive Suspension System (CLASS) project, which won the JEC World Automotive Application Innovation category in 2018. He is also leading the Composite UK Innovation Award winning Composite Hybrid Automotive Suspension System Innovative Structures (CHASSIS) project due for completion in 2021 and has 8 patents to his name.
Alan has a First Class Honours Degree and an MSc from the University of Bradford in the UK, is a Fellow and Chartered Engineer with the Institute of Engineering Technology and a Fellow of the Institute of Innovation and Knowledge Exchange, as well as a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers. He is also on the Research Board of The Welding Institute Research Committee and a Director of the Board for the Composites UK Trade Association. He is Chairman of the Vehicular Composites Group and the Lightweighting UK Auto Council Strategy Group.
Nick Weatherby
Technical Director of Haydale Composite Solutions based in Loughborough and is qualified in Materials, Physics and Mechanical engineering. His early career was spent with Marks and Spencer as a specialist in manmade fibres. After leaving M&S Nick focused on Machine design at Reiter-Scragg before moving in to the Aerospace and defence sectors. During this time, he worked with Colt industries, Dowty and TI before moving to EPL Composites in 1994 as a Composite design specialist. At EPL he has worked in many industrial sectors such as Oil and Gas, Power Transmission, Highway Safety Systems, Wind Turbine Technology and Road/Rail Transport applications to name a few using thermoplastic, thermoset, and bio composite solutions. EPL was purchased by Haydale Graphene in 2014 and Nick currently splits his time running a series of projects focused on delivering disruptive solutions. The current focus is the design and development of Composite high-pressure vessels for use with Hydrogen for Automotive, and for use with Xenon/additional propulsion mediums for low earth orbit satellite applications building on a 20-year involvement in these fields.
Marc Leifer
Mr. Marc Leifer is a chemistry graduate with more than 30 years' experience in the field of thermoplastic and thermoset polymers' formulation, transformation processes, analysis and properties assessment.
In 2003 Marc was appointed R&D EVP at Kafrit Group (Israel) and in 2008 as CTO at Caesar Stone.
Marc holds the position of Global TMS Manager at ICL-IP FR SBU since 2011.
Dr. Evert Smit
Dr. Evert Smit, a Dutch national, is active in the adhesive business since 1992, with major focus on Pressure Sensitive Adhesives and their applications in all possible field. This ranges from Medical, Building & Construction, Graphics, Electronics, to Transportation / Automotive. He has experience at different points along the value chain, from raw material to final tape application, and at different areas in the technology: from basic research to customer technical service. Having worked for National Starch & Chemical (Unilever, ICI), Henkel and Arizona Chemical (Kraton), he joined Lohmann in September 2015 to lead the R&D departments globally. Since end 2020 he is Director Scouting – co-creating the future of the Lohmann Company (https://www.lohmann-tapes.com/en/), actively scouting for and working with start-up companies and spin-offs that will contribute to the future of Lohmann.
He is currently President of the European Adhesive Tape association, Afera (https://www.afera.com/), after being Chairman of their Technical Committee for several years.
He presented many times at international conferences on the progress in the adhesives- and their applications fields, both from scientific and business standpoints, and both from his company and from his roles at Afera.
He lives with his family in Bonn, Germany.
Sam Haig
Sam is Battery Recycling Business Manager at R S Bruce Metals and Machinery, a precious metal recovery company in Sheffield, UK, and was previously Head of Engineering and Research at Axion Recycling. Sam has a decade’s experience in the waste management and recycling sector and has worked on a diverse range of projects from commissioning of residual waste treatment facilities to developing a patented process for fuel cell membrane recycling. Over the last five years, Sam has worked on the development of novel recycling techniques for lithium-ion batteries, collaborating with companies including Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan, and Johnson Matthey. Sam is a chartered chemical engineer and member of the Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Nathan Williams
Nathan Williams is the Founder & CEO of Minespider, a blockchain system for tracking responsibly-sourced materials along the supply chain, with ongoing projects with Fortune 100 companies such as Volkswagen and Google. Nathan has facilitated blockchain workshops as a visiting expert for the UNECE and the World Economic Forum. He has been featured in Bloomberg, Forbes, Huffington Post, and Wired Germany.
Professor Ton Peijs
Ton Peijs is the Professor of Polymer Engineering and Director of the National Polymer Processing Centre (NPPC) at WMG - University of Warwick and has been active in the field of polymers and composites for over 30 years. Ton has published over 300 peer reviewed papers in scientific journals, conference proceedings and book chapters. He has given numerous invited and keynote lectures at international conferences and has successfully supervised over 40 doctoral students. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal 'Nanocomposites' (Taylor & Francis Publ.) and is on the editorial board of another 15 international journals in the field of materials. His research interest are in thermoplastic composites for lightweighting, and sustainable and multifunctional polymers and composites.
Alberto Minguela
A building engineer and construction manager by training, Alberto holds a MSc in sustainable energy and the environment from the University of East London. He has worked with HSSMI since 2016 – first as a circular economy specialist – gaining an understanding of how the circular economy can be leveraged by the manufacturing industry and its extensive supply chain as a closed loop system. He has extensive experience as a circular economy entrepreneur, having co-founded Adaptavate, an award-winning start up. He is a certified practitioner in project management and lean manufacturing and holds an IMIAL Level 4 Award which certifies him in high voltage battery handling. He is considered a thought leader on end of life batteries, fostering transnational cooperation in the field, and is a founding member of the Sustainable Batteries Steering Group UK, a friend of the Global Battery Alliance and leader of project VALUABLE in the UK, chairing its Industrial Advisory Board.
He is currently Research & Innovation Manager at HSSMI, leading the development of successful collaborative R&D projects across the business, building consortia with national and international companies, tapping into his network thinking skills.
Fergal Harrington-Beatty
Fergal has over six years’ experience as a senior engineer and program lead in the electric vehicle industry having worked at Potenza Technology (BMS and EV battery integration specialist) and HSSMI (consulting automotive OEM’s incl. JLR, Ford, LEVC and Williams AE) prior to joining AMTE Power to lead their grant-funding strategy and automotive & aerospace strategy.
Fergal is drawing on his time leading multiple NVN, IUK, Faraday and APC projects to ensure AMTE successfully develops their Ultra Cell range from the R&D phase in Thurso, through scale-up to high volume in AMTE’s planned UK-based Gigafactory.
Ellison Anne Williams
Ellison Anne Williams is the Founder and CEO of Enveil, the pioneering Privacy Enhancing Technology company protecting Data in Use. Building on more than a decade of experience leading avant-garde efforts in the areas of large-scale analytics, information security, computer network exploitation, and network modeling, Ellison Anne founded the startup in 2016 to protect sensitive data while it's being used or processed – the 'holy grail' of data encryption. Powered by homomorphic encryption, Enveil’s award-winning ZeroReveal® solutions provide Trusted Compute in Untrusted Locations™, enabling previously impossible business functionalities for intelligence-led decision making.
Leveraging her deep technical background and a passion for evangelizing the impact of disruptive technologies, Ellison Anne has helped define and advance the Data in Use security space and cultivated Enveil’s capabilities into category-defining solutions that enable secure search, analytics, sharing, and collaboration. In addition to her ongoing contributions as a cybersecurity mentor and thought leader, Ellison Anne has been recognized as an SC Media Reboot Leadership Innovator Award winner, a Woman to Watch in Security, and a CyberScoop Leet List Honoree. She started her career at the U.S. National Security Agency and holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics (Algebraic Combinatorics), a M.S. in Mathematics (Set Theoretic Topology), and a M.S. in Computer Science (Machine Learning).