Keynote Speakers
Padraig McManus
Padraig McManus was appointed Chief Executive and Member of the Board in July 2002.
He joined ESB in 1973 and spent fifteen years on the Company's international businesses and later became Managing Director of ESB International and Commercial Director of ESB.
He is a Board Member of the Irish Management Institute, Business in the Community, the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies and the Advisory Board of Irish Aid.
Mr McManus is a member of the Health, Safety and Environment, Business Development and International and Market and Customer Committees of the Board.
Damini Kumar
The Conference will open on Thursday evening with an address by Damini Kumar, EU Ambassador for Creativity and Innovation on the theme of ‘How can we stimulate creativity and Innovation’
Damini Kumar is the Programme Director for Product Design at NUI Maynooth. While at NUI Maynooth she also created and launched ‘Imaginate 2009’, which is an exciting design competition open to all secondary school students across Ireland. Her objective for this very successful competition is to allow students to express their creativity in a local and purposeful context at an early age and engage with it on a more continuous basis in their everyday lives.
In Jan 2009, Damini was appointed European Ambassador for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation by the European Commission. Her role includes acting as an influential role model, highlighting through her own achievements the importance and value of creativity and innovation throughout 2009 and she is regularly invited to speak at conferences and events throughout Europe. She has written a manifesto and policy on Creativity and Innovation for the EU which will be presented to President Berlusconi in November. She is hoping to stimulate an interest in this area throughout Europe and especially in Ireland as she believes this is critical to the future of the economy!
Damini has won many awards and received huge worldwide media attention over the last few years and her exciting and innovative design work has created huge worldwide media interest so she is regularly asked to give talks, judge competitions, appears regularly in the press, TV and radio including BBC News, Sky News, The Big Breakfast, GMTV, BBC Tomorrow's World and she also presented a radio show on science and invention for BBC World Service.
Some of her many awards include.
• Winner of The Asian Young Achiever of the Year Award 2006 presented by Cherie Blair
• Royal Invitation by Her Majesty The Queen to meet her and attend the Women’s Achievement Lunch for the UK’s top 100 women she hosted at Buckingham Palace in 2004.
• Featured in Cosmopolitan Magazine’s top 100 Women in the World 2003
• Winner of The Young British Female Inventor of the year Award 2001
• Winner of BBC Tomorrow’s World Commended International Invention of the Year 2000
• Winner of the GG2 Young Achiever of the Year Award 1999
She also featured on the British Council's exhibition of 'Women Excelling in Science and Engineering', and as a result was invited to tour Australia in April 2002 to give talks, do media interviews and launch ICAN, Australia's Innovation Festival. Damini has used her media profile productively to promote creativity and innovation and she is also an active role model for young people.
A native of the UK, she graduated from Imperial College London with a Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering and later completed two Masters of Science degrees. In the UK Damini has worked in many fields including Product Design, Innovation, Research, and Engineering and has also consulted in these areas for many universities, institutions and research centres. She also worked as the event Director for the BBC Tomorrow's World Roadshow which entailed organising an annual 4 week touring event, bringing science in an exciting way to 100,000 children.
Damini's lifelong ambition was to be an inventor and since the age of five she has been actively designing solutions to problems that she has encountered. It was as part of her M.Sc. final year project in Engineering Product Design that Damini invented the world's first non-drip spout and disproved years of scientific research into the ubiquitous problem of the dripping teapot! The worldwide patented invention is simple and can be applied to any pouring spout from teapots to petrol pumps and can be manufactured in any materia.
Fergus Finlay
The Thursday night meal and Speaker is being kindly sponsored by NUI, Maynooth
Since June 2005 Fergus Finlay has been Chief Executive of Barnardos, Ireland's largest children's charity. For around twenty years prior to that he was employed as Senior Adviser to the Labour Party, serving in three Governments and working for the Party in opposition. He was one of the drafters of the Downing Street Declaration and was centrally involved in the election of President Mary Robinson in 1990, together with other political events of the period. He also served for three years as a Director of Wilson Hartnell Public Relations.
Fergus Finlay is the author of three best-selling books. He has founded a number of organisations that campaign for the rights of people with disabilities, and has just completed a four-year term as Chairperson of Special Olympics Ireland. He is currently Chair of Volunteering Ireland. He broadcasts regularly on radio and television, and contributes a weekly column to the Irish Examiner