When and Where?

Director of Care & Wellbeing
Royal Star & Garter

Shirley is a Registered Nurse and worked for 10 years in the NHS, specialising in cardiology care and setting up rehabilitation services for patients post-heart attack and surgery. She then joined the British Heart Foundation, where she developed its pioneering ‘Hearty Lives’ programme, which aimed to address obesity and inequalities for younger people. She has gone on to hold a variety of senior roles at organisations including the Retirement Villages Group and The ExtraCare Charitable Trust. 

Shirley has worked closely with the national Gold Standards Framework, the UK’s leading training provider for generalist frontline staff in caring for people in the last years of life. She has a passion for innovation and technology within the care sector, implementing the wellbeing research from Aston University, designing an app for wellbeing and a validated frailty calculator for use with residents in retirement villages.

Project Manager
Devices for Dignity

Hayley is a theme manager at Devices for Dignity (D4D), the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in long-term conditions. D4D's aim is to deliver health technologies into the lives of patients through involvement of patients, public and carers, co-designing products that we hope will make a difference. Hayley works on the Diabetes and Mental Health themes identifying areas in which we can provide the best support through innovation and technology. 

With a background in Tissue Engineering and 10 years’ experience in the development of implantable Biomaterials, Hayley is experienced in translational research, establishing Quality Management System procedures for products, and navigating regulatory, design and development pathways to evidence pre-clinical safety and performance of medical devices. 

Project Manager
Devices for Dignity

Dan is a theme manager at Devices for Dignity (D4D), the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in long-term conditions. D4D's aim is to deliver health technologies into the lives of patients through involvement of patients, public and carers, co-designing products that we hope will make a difference.

 Dan previously managed the Assistive Technology theme with EMERGENCE co-applicant Professor Mark Hawley, before recently changing themes to work on Kidney Care technologies and Methodological Innovation.  

Assistive Technology Clinical Specialist
Barnsley Foundation NHS Hospital Trust

Zoë has two roles within Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust: Environmental Control (EC) Service of the Assistive Technology (AT) Team; and Lead Healthcare Scientist (LHCS)

Zoë leads the Environmental Control (EC) service of the Barnsley Assistive Technology (AT) Team, which delivers specialised services across the Yorkshire and Humber region. In this role Zoë manages a team of clinicians, plans service provision, manages contractors and plans future strategy of EC within Yorkshire and the Humber. Key elements of this include managing contractor performance and continuously evaluating the balance between in-house and contractor delivery of the installation element of the service; to ensure it makes best use of its budget. Zoë also represents EC nationally on the Rehabilitation and Disability Clinical Reference Group (CRG).

As LHCS Zoë represents Healthcare Scientists (HCSs) within the Trust and links directly with the Medical Director. The LHCS role was designed to provide representation of Healthcare Science at Trust level; and also to enable contributions from Healthcare Scientists into other work within the Trust, such as R&D and Innovation. 

Zoë is extremely passionate about Electronic Assistive Technology (EAT) but also the importance of it being appropriately developed and provided, as technology, in order to work, needs to fit the needs of the person. Zoë has a specific interest in the use of EAT with people with learning disabilities.

Assistant Professor
University of Florence

Laura Fiorini is an assistant professor at the University of Florence, Department of Industrial Engineering, Florence, Italy. She received the M.Sc. Degree in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Pisa in 2012 (full marks, cum laude). She obtained a Ph.D. in Biorobotics (full marks, cum laude) at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, in 2016. In 2015 she visited the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at the University of West England (Bristol, UK).  From 2016 to 2020, she was a postdoc researcher at the BioRobotics Institute and she collaborated on different EU and national projects such as Robot-Era, ACCRA, CloudIA, and SI-ROBOTICS. Currently, she is the coordinator of the Italian pilot site of the Pharaon Project.   

Research Scientist

Honda Research Institute Japan

Sara Cooper is a biomedical and robotics engineer, working at Honda Research Institute Japan. After her MSc in Robotics at Heriot-Watt University (Scotland, UK) she joined PAL Robotics (Barcelona, Spain) to become involved in many research projects as well as business applications that aim to develop assistive robots to help improve quality of life older adults.  In Honda, she worked as a researcher on developing social robots as social mediators between children of different cultures, to improve socio-emotional interaction in line with UNICEF guidelines. By using co-design and actual real-world implementations she aims to bridge the gap of HRI between lab and industry.

Professor of Robot Ethics, University of the West of England

Speaker bio coming soon...

Senior Research Fellow
UCL

Dr. Cian O'Donovan is a Senior Research Fellow at UCL's Department of Science and Technology Studies. He studies the policies and processes of AI, robotics and digital change using social science-led interdisciplinary methods. He collaborates with people directly impacted by innovation, such as organisations, professionals and service-users in care sectors. His research looks at what happens when digital innovation appears in sectors usually neglected by technology policy or Silicon Valley, asking questions like who really benefits from innovation in these places; who is driving and steering change, and what are the impacts for people and planet?

Cian leads the EMERGENCE Network project CPD Ecosystems - which is examining what kind of training care professionals need to use robotic systems safely and on their own terms.

Professor of the Care of Older People

University of Nottingham

Professor Adam Gordon trained in Edinburgh, Dundee and Sydney before settling in Nottingham. He is Professor of the Care of Older People at the University of Nottingham and a Consultant Geriatrician at the University Hospitals of Derby and Burton. He is the current President of British Geriatrics Society, serving from November 2022 to November 2024.

Prof. Gordon is an National Institute of Health Research Senior Investigator and leads the Nottingham arm of the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration for East Midlands (ARC-EM) and the Building Community Resilience and Enabling Independence theme within the ARC. He is a firm believer in bringing clinicians from the full range of health and social care disciplines into research and ensuring that care professionals and patients can access the results of research to improve their care experience. His clinical academic interests centre around the implementation of evidence-based models of care to deliver improved health outcomes for older people with frailty. He is particularly interested in the needs of the care home population and has played a leading role in studies evaluating models of healthcare to this sector. He has also recently begun to work in the field of sarcopenia as part of the Centre for Musculoskeletal Ageing Research, University of Nottingham. He maintains an active educational portfolio, and played a key role in developing the UK and European recommended undergraduate curricula in Geriatric Medicine.

Professor of Embodied Intelligence

University of Nottingham

Biography coming soon

Technical Manager

University of Nottingham

Biography coming soon

Associate Professor in Robotics and AI

University of Nottingham

Biography coming soon

Teaching Associate

University of Nottingham

Biography coming soon

Assistant Professor of Assistive Robotics

University of Nottingham

Biography coming soon

Assistant Professor of Human Factors

University of Nottingham

Biography coming soon

Assistant Professor of Robotics and AI

University of Nottingham

Biography coming soon

CMS Manager & Research Fellow

University of Nottingham

Biography coming soon

Assistant Professor of Intelligent Sensing

University of Nottingham

Biography coming soon