✨ A few highlights from 2025, by no means exhaustive and very hard to choose!
(Pretty indicative of how busy this year has been that I am only getting around to this now).
▶️ In March, with our partners Learnovate Centre, Trinity College Dublin and MIDAS Ireland we hosted our European Chips Diversity Alliance partners from across Europe here in Ireland, spotlighting initiatives across Ireland to make careers in STEM more accessible. We also got to meet in Eindhoven in September and looking forward to 2026 meet ups in new and familiar cities in Europe.
▶️This year we developed our AI Career Coach taking it from concept to real users. It was a long but rewarding journey and grateful to my collaborators Christoph Burnicki, David Tee and Allison Kuschel for bringing their expertise and passion to the project. We have more pilots scheduled in the New Year and you can read more about our research in our white paper on the EudaOrg website. Grateful to the Open Doors Initiative, especially Talita Holzer and Enterprise Ireland for making this research possible.
▶️ In October I spoke at Accelerating Europe's Tech Advantage in Brussels and shared our message that we need to widen the talent pipeline to people outside education, including the 3 million people under 25 and the 50% of people with disabilities in Europe experiencing unemployment. Grateful to SEMI Europe, OECD - OCDE, and the EU STEM Coalition for giving me the platform to discuss this issue.
▶️ To round off the year, I had the pleasure of attending International Day of Disability in University College Dublin and Logitech in December in Cork, and demoing our AI Coach's application for neurodivergent students and workers. Meeting people developing ground breaking technology to build more equitable societies was as exciting to see as the people eager to support and champion these advances. A great note to end the year on! Thank you to Lizbeth Goodman for the invite.
Other highlights include publishing the first comprehensive report on DEI in the semiconductor sector in Europe (link in the comments), demoing our technology at SEMICON Europa in Munich, and being nominated for the Tech Industry Alliance Leader Award for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Ready for 2026 and everything planned and unplanned. But for now, looking forward to a rest and time to reflect.