Invited Panellist at BQIT2019

I had the pleasure of attending the Bristol Quantum Information Technologies conference (1-3rd April). I was invited as a panellist for the diversity session - although it was only an hour long, it was great to see all the conference participants engaged! Many commenting that it should be longer next time! On the panel with me are: Prof. Havi Carel (Univ. of Bristol), Dr. Juani Bermejo-Vega (Free Univ. of Berlin), Lara Lalemi (Univ. of Bristol) and Prof. Jonas Rademacker (Univ. of Bristol).

I spoke about how equality is not the same as equity, and how equality, diversity & inclusion is important for everyone; we need to think about bias and accessibility with regards to black, asian, minority ethnic scientists as well as those within the LGBTQ+ community, people who have disabilities and those from different social economic backgrounds.

I mentioned the need for data gathering to link up hard evidence with known issues and stories that we all hear from colleagues. TIGER in STEMM is one such way you can be involved in this.

As a peripheral quantum experimentalist, I also enjoyed the talks! I met some fantastic entrepreneurs too including Dr. Josh Silverstone who founded a company called Qontrol who make scalable control electronics for photonics.