Lauren Bradshaw

The North East has such a thriving community around the tech sector, and I’m excited by the potential to foster greater collaboration across different areas in the region, and to grow the profile and visibility of our shared successes and contribution to the wider UK economy. Having worked at three of the North East universities I’ve really been able to appreciate the breadth of talent and innovation happening right here on our doorstep – and the opportunity to help leverage more support and engagement with this activity through Dynamo seemed like a no-brainer!

I currently work as a Deputy Director at Teesside University overseeing an external affairs brief that covers communications, PR, events, fundraising, alumni engagement and community impact. I’m really lucky to have such a varied role supporting our institution’s engagement with the communities around us, and given our history in computing, digital, gaming and animation, strong links to the tech sector are really critical to much of our partnership work with industry.

I’m proud of the work I contributed to around the re-launch of Computer Science at Durham University, setting up a global advisory board and fundraising for key initiatives around women in technology and access to education. It was great to see the impact of this work as the Department grew and developed, and our intake of undergraduate women rose from around 5% to almost 50%, which was fantastic.

I also really enjoyed contributing to the launch of the Durham Venture School programme, leveraging alumni from across the globe to give back their time and resources to support the next generation of start-ups in the region. I had the opportunity to speak about this project with some former colleagues at a conference the other year, which was really warmly received, and seeing the scale of the programme now and the success some of the companies have since achieved since is really gratifying.

I’m also very proud of the work we do here at Teesside, particularly around community impact and engagement. Teesside University has such a strong civic mission, and its position as an anchor institution is really echoed throughout everything we do. We launched our matched staff giving programme, Be the Change, about a year ago which has gone on to support a number of local charities and community groups in the area. We’re also expanding our Community Hub to make the resources of our institution more available and impactful to the communities around us, which I think should be a key priority for all universities today as vehicles of civic impact and regional development.

Staying informed on the needs and challenges of industry is critical to inform student recruitment, course development, and the delivery of our skills pipeline to businesses, so we always strive to use our network –in terms of students, alumni, industry partners and government stakeholders – to keep on top of industry trends. Our School of Computing, Engineering, and Digital Technologies holds a large number of partnerships with local, national, and international companies which informs our strategy in this areas, and we also host and attends various networking events across the region to stay engaged.

I enjoy music, comedy, and staying active – I did a couple of marathons a while ago (at a point when I had more time and energy to maintain that level of fitness!) but tend to settle these days for the Great North Run, or some of our local 10k events around the region. We also welcomed a puppy into the household not so long ago, which has turned out to be quite a large investment in time, patience, and furniture!

Dynamo provides a mouthpiece for organisations in the North East to shout a little louder about what they’re doing – both in terms of celebrating their successes, and in terms of advocating for change, and for investment. There’s so many great things happening in our region, and so much potential for growth, but we can do so much more to lobby and represent our region if we speak with a unified voice, which I believe Dynamo can facilitate.

Dynamo is also fantastic way to stay connected and to network, collaborate, and build partnerships within our region. Although we’re not huge, sometimes our towns and cities seem quite disparate in terms of their demographic of organisations, and research expertise, so I think we can seize more opportunities to bring partners together by growing this network organically across the region.

Dynamo is also a great place to share best practice, to tackle challenges, and to find proactive solutions to shared issues facing the sector. The Board have already surfaced some key topics which feel ubiquitous to most tech organisations around recruitment and retention, innovation, and EDI – I think if we can capture the input from across our membership, and use our resources and network to provide tools, approaches, and thought leadership pieces to address some of these challenges, we can do a lot to support stakeholders in the regional sector to grow and thrive, which is what a booming tech community is all about.