Anders Gulliksson

Anders Gulliksson works as R & D Manager at Dafo Vehicle Fire Protection. Anders has over 20 years of experience with fire suppression systems and detection covering large gas extinguishing systems through various specialized local protection applications for industrial and automotive applications. He has been a frequent speaker on various conferences and events and has also been participating in international standardization work within the CEN.

Sandra McClelland,

Sandra McClelland is a Key Account Manager specializing in high performance materials for Solvay Specialty Polymers. With over 25 years of plastics industry experience, Sandra works with major automotive OEMs and global Tier One companies on new applications for automotive specializing in light weighting. She has 6 patents and numerous publications

Sandra is the Chair Emeritus of the American Chemistry Council (ACC) Plastics Division Auto Team.  She is a Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) Honored Service Member, is on the SPE Detroit Section Board of Directors managing the education program and currently serves as co-chair of the SPE Auto EPCON engineering plastics conference.  Sandra is located in the Detroit Michigan area.

Karan Bhalla

Karan has been in the plastics industry for more than 15 years and leading the market development activities for Washington Penn Plastics for 6 years in Europe. He is an automotive enthusiast who is always excited to bring newer ideas to market to make better products.

He holds a Masters of Business Administration degree from Purdue University and studied Materials Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Anthony Schiavo

Anthony Schiavo is a Research Director at Lux, and leads the Accelerating Materials Innovation program. Under his leadership, the Accelerating Materials Innovation program covers innovation and technology development that intersect with the future of the chemicals and materials industry, sustainability, digital transformation, and consumer transformation.  His expertise includes future materials like graphene, digital technologies like materials informatics, and challenges like the future of plastic waste. Anthony often is called upon to provide strategic advice and guidance for executives in the automotive, chemicals, and consumer goods industries.

Anthony received a B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Virginia Tech. During his tenure at Virginia Tech, Anthony focused his research activities on biomaterial composites and nanoparticle technology, and ethics.

Amanda Zani

Amanda is a professional with 13 years of experience in the Plastic and Petrochemical Industry, most of them focused on Strategy, Business Intelligence and I&T. Amanda is graduated Mechanical Engineering at USP with a Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) from Fundação Getulio Vargas and Executive Education at Columbia Business School. At Braskem since 2008, a Brazilian company, the largest producer of thermoplastics resins in the Americas and the eighth-largest in the world, she have worked in different areas. The most recent responsibility was at Mobility Squad, and now is leading the Lightweight Platform, focusing in the automotive industry.

Jeremy Parkes

Jeremy Parkes is the Global Business Lead in DNV for Electric Vehicles. He is responsible for defining and developing DNV’s services in the EV sector to cement the company’s role as a leader in this fast-developing market. He is also lead author for DNV’s Power Supply and Use companion report to the Energy Transition Outlook https://eto.dnvgl.com. Jeremy has over 20 years’ experience in the transport and renewables industries, beginning his career at Rolls Royce before moving into renewables as head of forecasting and later asset management at DNV and Belltown Power.

Matthew Lumsden

Paul Gallen

Paul has over 25 years experience of leading composites developments in automotive and other sectors. He has contributed to industry roadmaps and programmes for automotive and composite industries over the last 8 years, and played an instrumental role in setting up the Automotive Composite Group within the UK’s Composite Leadership Forum.

Paul strongly believes that composites, used in the right place, can make better products, where multi-functionality, safety or lighter weight provide benefits. Lightweighting alone does not provide a large enough benefit case as we move towards zero-carbon vehicles, and the emphasis has changed towards enabling BEVs and FCEVs.

Paul is Sales Director, Automotive Composites, for Hankuk Composite UK Ltd, who produce a wide range of composite materials optimised for zero-carbon mobility.

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.