2019 Speakers

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This is an archive page – for details of this year’s event, please go to radiotechcon.com

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The Radio TechCon 2019 speakers are a talented bunch, with experience ranging from academic research to project planning, studio design and sound engineering expertise.

You can find out all out them on this page.

If you want to know what they are talking about, check out our Sessions page, too.

David Lloyd – Radio TechCon Host

Former commercial radio executive turned radio consultant, historian and broadcaster, David has been in radio forty years, running stations of all formats from Galaxy to Century, LBC to Virgin. He’s also the author of How to Make Great Radio, Radio Moments and Radio Secrets.

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Leslie Gaston-Bird (AMPS, M.P.S.E.) – Governor-at-Large, Audio Engineering Society / Tutor, Institute of Contemporary Music Performance

Leslie Gaston-Bird has over 30 years of experience as an audio engineer and is author of Women in Audio. She has taught at the University of Colorado Denver as a professor, and is now a freelance sound editor and re-recording mixer. She worked in public radio for 12 years as a Broadcast/Recording technician at National Public Radio and Audio Systems Manager at Colorado Public Radio, overseeing a statewide network of news and classical music programming. She currently freelances and her company is Mix Messiah Productions.

Andrew Bonney – Senior R&D Engineer, BBC R&D

Andrew forms part of a BBC team with a focus on applying IP and IT technology to media production challenges. He has spent much of the past few years working with the wider industry to develop a set of standard APIs for broadcast control. Prior to his time working in R&D, Andrew was most likely to be found in the basement of Manchester’s students’ union, attempting to keep their radio station on air.

Adam Bowie – Business Development Manager, BBC World Service

Adam Bowie is Business Development Manager at the BBC World Service. He has worked with the BBC for five years across the BBC World Service’s portfolio, carrying out strategy, and helping extend the BBC’s podcast carriage globally. In 2018 he helped launch commercialisation BBC podcasts outside the UK, working with Acast.

Previously, he worked for Absolute Radio and Virgin Radio in the United Kingdom, looking after research and digital strategy. There he worked closely with the UK¹s radio ratings body, RAJAR, and helped introduce targeted audio advertising for Absolute Radio¹s digital stream.

His interests include cycling (including being a producer of The Cycling Podcast), photography, flying drones and following Arsenal football club.

Dr. Sandy Claes – Lead User Researcher, VRT

Sandy Claes currently leads the user research team of the innovation department of the Flemish public broadcaster VRT. Here, they set up prototypes to make future technologies more tangible for radio, television and digital producers. Sandy has a background in audio-visual (2005) arts and obtained a PhD in engineering science at KU Leuven (2017).

Luke Eldridge – Project Manager, BBC

Luke manages the BBC’s Internet Fit Radio project, which has the lofty ambition of creating the best described audio in the world. He joined the BBC in 2018 after a decade of managing technology projects in Retail, Financial Services and Transportation. He is an award-winning radio documentary maker, whose work has featured on the BBC, NPR and ABC.

Bruno Fazenda – Director of Postgraduate Research, Acoustics Research Centre, University of Salford

Bruno Fazenda received a B.Sc. (1st Hons.) degree in audio technology in 1999 and a Ph.D. degree in 2004 for his thesis on the perception of room modes, both from the University of Salford, UK. He worked for a short while as a research fellow with a Marie Curie research fellowship at the Danish Technical University before becoming a lecturer in the UK. He now lectures in the acoustics and audio area at the University of Salford. His research interests in acoustics, psychoacoustics, multimodal perception in virtual realities and archaeoacoustics, focus particularly on the assessment of how an acoustic environment, technology or psychological state impacts on the perception of sound. He is also a keen student on aspects of human evolution, perception, and brain function. He is a member of the Audio Engineering Society and the Institute of Acoustics.

Dr. Marcos Felipe Simón Gálvez – Co-Founder and CTO, AudioScenic

Marcos Simón is currently working full-time as CTO at Audioscenic, with an intention to change the way people enjoys audio. Researcher and inventor by nature, his main interests are solving everyday problems and increasing the quality of life of today’s society with clever, science-backed solutions. His background as a broadcast video engineer and as acoustic researcher and recently as innovative start-up founder, brings a good combination of disciplines together.

Stephanie Hirst – Presenter

With over 14 awards and 11 years hosting Capital FM’s breakfast show, Stephanie is one of the UK’s biggest radio stars. In 2014 she took a break from broadcasting but was eventually lured back after 18 months to the BBC where she hosts a ‘Vinyl Revival’ show every Saturday night on BBC Manchester, as well as presenting ‘The Stephane Hirst Show’ weekday mornings on BBC Radio Leeds. 

Expanding into TV, she has presented for ITV’s Lorraine, BBC Breakfast, BBC Inside Out, and written for The Guardian & The Independent.

Starting her career aged 12 at Radio Aire in Leeds, securing a slot on the overnight show at 16, this took her on an unbelievable journey hosting some of the biggest commercial radio shows in the UK, including the national Sunday top 40 show ‘Hit40UK’ for 3 years, along with interviewing some of the world’s biggest stars.

Dr. Lawrie Hallett – Operations Director, Future Digital Norfolk Limited

Poacher turned gamekeeper – from pirate radio to Ofcom via BFBS, Phoenix Communications and Radica Broadcast Systems Limited. Currently lectures in Radio and Journalism at the University of Bedfordshire. Launched Future Digital Norfolk Limited in 2014 and has been running the “six month” small-scale DAB trial there ever since!

Quentin Howard, FIET

Quentin built Classic FM and its transmitter network where he also presented an award-winning programme. He led the commercial development of DAB including the the DAB chip used by Pure and many other brands. Whilst President of the WorldDAB Forum he created the DAB+ standard, was a director of Frontier Silicon and APT-X, ran BFBS TV and BFBS Technology, is a Trustee for the National Library of Wales, the British Wireless for the Blind Fund and Project Director for Quidem Productions, working on TV and radio commissions and co-hosting the Allergy Today Podcast.

Quentin is married to Annette whom he met at Devizes hospital radio, is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, owns a 1955 Velocette motorbike, takes ballet classes and shoots clay pigeons.

E-J James – Director, EJHR Consulting

E-J has in excess of 15 years’ experience of working across a variety of industries and sectors: airport retail, betting and gaming, niche construction, not for profit, charities. E-J is a member of the CPID with the last decade spent working either as a part of or, more recently, consulting for senior management teams. She now primarily works with SMEs, reducing the pain that many business owners experience in the face of change when it comes to their recruitment needs and/or as they deal with employee relations challenges.

She is also studying on an MSc programme at the Metanoia Institute. This will enable her to become an accredited Psychotherapist.

Muki Kulhan – CIO, Executive XR Producer & Creative Tech Analyst, Muki International Ltd.

Muki is an award-winning Executive Digital XR Producer and keynote speaker with over two decades pioneering groundbreaking content for music, broadcasting, entertainment & tech innovation. Formerly MTV, BBC, ITV and major labels, she now runs her own production company creating Immersive XR experiences and R&D innovation strategies for BOSE, RAINDANCE, SXSW, ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS SPATIAL AUDIO FORUM, Red Giant VFX, IBC, 5GUK Network, Women in Immersive Tech (WiIT) & many more.

Bekki Leaver – Design Researcher, BBC

Bekki has spent the past decade working on websites and interfaces across a broad range of industries, from chainsaws to government systems, and the past year focussing on radio production tools and tech. She’s particularly interested in cognitive load in audio production, which she’ll be delving into for her Master’s thesis in 2020.

Simon Mason – Head of Broadcast Radio Technology, Arqiva

I have worked in the Broadcast industry for 35 years in a range of roles from Radio content production to designing high power Radio transmitter networks.

For the last 20 years I have worked for Arqiva who run the majority of TV and Radio Broadcast Transmission Networks in the UK on behalf of our customers and provide infrastructure for the Mobile Network Operators. I have always had a very deep interest in how Radio content is delivered to the end user in the best way to give the consumer the best experience possible in terms of convenience, audio quality and availability.

Paul Morgan – Head of Technology (Radio), BBC

Paul Morgan has been working at the BBC in the fields of engineering, technology, sound and vision for 30 years. He started out in 1989 as a Broadcast Engineer, working as part of the team that keeps the BBC’s nine national radio stations on the air and also spent some time as a sound engineer for BBC World Service before moving into solution design and project management roles. As Head of Technology for BBC Radio he is responsible for the technical innovation and continuous improvement that helps keeps the BBC at the top of its game as one of the most creative and trusted media organisations in the world.

Andrew Murphy – Lead Research Engineer, BBC R&D

Andrew Murphy is a Lead Research Engineer at BBC Research and Development. He has developed prototype hardware and software to support research in a number of fields and has worked within standardisation groups such as Digital Audio Broadcasting, Digital Radio Mondiale, Digital Video Broadcasting and 3GPP. He is currently leading BBC R&D’s work into 4G and 5G broadcasting.

Robin Pembrooke, Director, Content Production Systems, BBC

Robin leads the teams that design and build the systems that the BBC uses to make its content across Radio, TV and Online. He joined the BBC in 2013 and led the product and technology teams for BBC News as it expanded the World Service operations into over 40 languages. Prior to the BBC he ran the digital operations of ITV and Global Radio.

Nick Prater – Head of Broadcast Technology, Wireless Group

Nick began moving radio stations when Capital relocated from Euston Tower to Leicester Square. He worked on moves for Classic FM and talkSPORT (the first time) before co-founding Radiomonitor.com. He recently moved talkSPORT (for the second time) along with Virgin, talkRADIO and other Wireless stations.

Chris Roberts, Product Manager, BBC

Chris joined the BBC in 2012, starting at the coal face of engineering support whilst Radio 1 moved from Yalding House to New Broadcasting House, and is now leading the Internet Fit Radio product in BBC Design + Engineering Content Production Workflows. Chris specialises in building automatic metadata production tools to help producers describe their content as accurately and usefully as possible.

Dino Sofos – Editor, Brexitcast – BBC News

Dino runs the podcast unit at BBC News. He is the creator and editor of the award-winning Brexticast podcast, which launched as a TV programme on BBC One earlier this year. He has recently launched a spin-off podcast called Electioncast. Dino has also launched a news podcast for younger audiences called The Next Episode. Dino has previously worked at BBC Radio 5 live, launching Pienaar’s Politics and producing Richard Bacon. He began his career at BBC Radio Sheffield.

Chris Thame – Lead Broadcast Engineer, Wireless Group

Chris started out at talkSPORT six years ago (when it was just talkSPORT!). During that time he was involved in launching talkSPORT2, talkRADIO and Virgin Radio UK, heading up all of Virgin Radio’s live and recorded band sessions, both in house and out on the road. Since then he headed up the relocation and relaunch of all 4 stations, including launching Virgin Anthems, Virgin Chilled, and relocating three Scottish Sun music stations to The News Building. He used to have a lot more hair….

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