Speakers
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Dawid Konotey-Ahulu Co-founder of mallowstreet
Dawid is Co-founder of Redington, mallowstreet, and 10,000 Black Interns (a charitable foundation arranging internships for undergraduates either of Black heritage or with a disability).
Dawid qualified as a barrister in 1987 and then spent 16 years in investment banking. He was named Black British Business Entrepreneur of the Year in 2018 and is on the Prime Minister’s Business Council 2022. He was awarded a CBE in the 2022 New Year Honours List. Dawid is passionate about mentoring young people and helping them learn to speak confidently in public so that they can tell their story and ‘hold the room spellbound’. He is also on the Boards of Mission 44 and Somerset House.
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Leandros Kalispearas Chief Investment Officer, West Yorkshire Pension Fund
Leandros is the Chief Investment Officer of West Yorkshire Pension Fund (‘WYPF’), which has approximately £18bn of assets and 300,000 members, and is part of Northern LGPS. He leads a large investment team directly allocating across public, private and alternatives markets, alongside the collaborative partnerships in infrastructure though GLIL and in private equity through NPEP.
He was most recently Head of Portfolio Solutions at abrdn and Head of Credit at USS, and started his career in banking and alternatives firms.
Leandros has an MBA from INSEAD and an MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford.
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Charlie Robertson Head of Macro-Strategy, FIM Partners
Charlie worked for 12 years at ING Barings and 12 years at Renaissance Capital before joining the buyside firm FIM Partners. His second book The Time Travelling Economist was published in 2022 and was runner-up in BCA’s Business Book of the Year award. He was the top-rated Frontier Analyst for 2016-20 and top-rated Emerging Europe Analyst from 2007-10. He previously worked in parliament, a defence think-tank and an economic research house.
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Mike Weston Independent
Mike spent over 4 years successfully leading and building LGPSCentral; increasing from 3 to 26 the investment funds operating across both public and private markets, driving the responsible investment agenda, more than doubling the team in Wolverhampton to 80 skilled investment professionals and delivering the investment performance and cost savings to support long-term pension payments by Partner Funds to their scheme members.
Prior to this Mike was CEO of the Pensions Infrastructure Platform, at the time a pension scheme owned specialist UK infrastructure investor and Chief Investment Officer for the pension schemes of DMGT plc.
Mike is also Chair of Trustees of the Institute of Cancer Research Pension Scheme.
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Priya Lakhani AI Entrepreneur
After giving up a career in law to pursue a dream of running her own business, Priya built and sold a successful food brand. She then established a social enterprise before starting a tech company that brings together AI and education in order to understand how students learn and provide educators with an insight into how to create personalised education. She tackles themes including what innovation means and how to embed it into a culture, how leaders need to be adaptable especially in times of crisis, and why keeping values at the core of what you do is the best strategy for success. Priya serves as a non-Exec DCMS board member and regularly contributes to BBC News.
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Dr Tim Gregory Planetary Geologist
Dr Tim Gregory works full-time as a nuclear chemist in the heart of the British nuclear industry. He spends his work days in the lab measuring the chemical and isotopic composition of nuclear materials on a variety of different projects. His love for science shines through in his day job, public speaking, and media activities.
Tim’s background is in academia. After completing a PhD at the University of Bristol researching the formation of the Solar System using meteorites, Tim became a postdoctoral researcher at the British Geological Survey in Nottingham. His background on the cutting edge of academic research prepared him perfectly for his sideways career step into the nuclear industry.
In 2020, Tim’s debut book – Meteorite: How Stones from Outer Space Made Our World — was published by John Murray to critical acclaim. In 2017, Tim surpassed thousands of applicants for a place in the six-part BBC2 series Astronauts: Do You Have What It Takes?, where he was put through the full rigours of astronaut selection and reached the final three. Since then, he has gone on to present a segment about meteorites on BBC4’s The Sky at Night and has made live television appearances on BBC Breakfast, BBC Look North, and BBC Points West. He frequently features on local and national radio to talk about events in the world of space, science, and nuclear. Tim loves nothing more than sharing his love of science and the wonders of the natural world. Tim completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Manchester where he achieved a first class with honours in Geology with Planetary Science (MEarthSci).
