Charlotte Goy
Speaker
Chief Executive at Destination Lincolnshire
Charlotte Goy, Chief Executive at Destination Lincolnshire | The embodiment of Destination Lincolnshire, you’ll be hard-pressed to find someone more passionate about Lincolnshire and its visitor economy. A true champion for what the county stands for, Charlotte is a true believer that Lincolnshire can fulfil its potential to be jostling for a prime position among the top 10 visitor destinations.
Having been at the centre of destination marketing within the county for 15 years, Charlotte has worked her way up through the DMO – from marketing executive to PR director and now chief executive. She has seen our county’s growth and successes as well as its struggles, at all levels, building up unrivalled industry knowledge, contacts and an incomparable level of understanding.
Following years of hard work, Charlotte has recently driven the efforts to see Greater Lincolnshire and Rutland achieve Local Visitor Economy Partnership LVEP accreditation with VisitEngland. The bid was led by Destination Lincolnshire and will unlock growth opportunities for the area’s multi-billion-pound visitor economy.
Emma Oliver-Townrow
Speaker
Director, Business Creative and Business Development Manager, Stokes Teas and Coffees
Emma Olivier-Townrow, also known as The Business Creative, is a visionary business consultant based in Lincolnshire. With a diverse background as an educator, facilitator, networker, government business mentor and business transformation lead.
Emma specialises in driving productivity growth and revenue increase through the power of creative innovation and sustainable business practice. As the Chair of Team Lincolnshire and Chair of Grimsby’s Arts Council NPO Culture House, Emma is also a board member of The Destination Lincolnshire; Lincoln Connected Project, the GLLEP Visitor Economy board and the Lincolnshire FA Inclusion Advisory Group. Emma is passionate and dedicated to promoting sustainability, diversity, inclusion, and equity across all business operations.
With her passion for exemplary customer care and with 30 years of successful results in both the public and private sector, including Lincoln College Group, The New Theatre Royal Lincoln, Grimsby Minster, Lincoln University, Destination Lincolnshire and many more Emma combines innovation, compassion, and business acumen to embed sustainable practices and strategy to increase revenues and equitable growth.
Nick Turner
Speaker
Chief Operating Officer, Luxury Hotel Management
Over 30 years in senior leadership roles developing and operating high quality hotel and resort assets throughout the UK & Ireland, Europe, Middle East & Africa. Instrumental in the expansion of multi award-winning hotels and brands from the roll out of Malmaison and Handpicked Hotels in the 1990s to the highly successful Village Hotels and Intercontinental Hotel brands during the early 2000s.
Nick specialises in the repositioning and performance management of underperforming leisure assets with his keen interest in value creation, profit delivery and operational excellence. Nick has also turned around numerous high-profile assets and portfolios and more recently has utilised his 30 years in the hospitality industry experience to support owners of individual assets and collections to drive operational performance and reposition hotels in terms of quality, service, and financial performance.
Dr Natalie Wilmot
Event Host
Dean of Lincoln International Business School, University of Lincoln
Dr Agnieszka Rydzik
Speaker
Associate Professor in Tourism and Work, University of Lincoln
She has recently been successful with her BA Mid-Career Fellowship application and has been awarded £153,809 for a 12-month research project on ‘Evolving worker agency in the increasingly automated and digitalised hospitality workplace’.
Agnieszka’s research broadly focuses on: i) employment relations, worker agency and the future of work; ii) the gendered, racialised and precarious nature of work; iii) tourism and hospitality employment; and iv) hospitality, migration and welcome. She is interested in community-based research, and visual and participatory methodologies, and is passionate about creating more just and inclusive workplaces and communities.
Agnieszka has researched the employment experiences of migrant women in hospitality; experiences of women brewers; the implications of technology-driven transformations on lower-skilled tourism workers; socialisation of young workers through flexible hospitality work, and working students’ experiences of insecure employment. She has published in highly ranked journals, including Work, Employment and Society; Human Resource Management Journal; Annals of Tourism Research; and Journal of Sustainable Tourism. Her WES article on women brewers and identity work was nominated for the BSA’s SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence.
She is currently co-editing (with Dr Nicola Chanamuto and Prof. Donna Chambers) a Special Issue of Hospitality & Society on ‘Migration, hospitality and belonging: Negotiating and enabling belonging in times of increasing inhospitality’ and a book (with Dr Maria Gebbels) on ‘Making Britain Home: Central and Eastern European women academics navigating belonging, hospitality and welcome in contemporary Britain’.
The Good Student Employer Charter
She is the founder of the ‘Hospitality Now! Students for Hospitality, Hospitality for Students’ initiative (www.hospitality-now.co.uk) which engages regional and national stakeholders, policymakers and hospitality employers in bringing change in working conditions for working students and helping local businesses grow talent, address labour shortages and increase staff retention. In November 2023, together with industry partners, she launched the Good Student Employer Charter (https://www.hospitality-now.co.uk/good-student-employer-charter/), a free initiative for employers who hire students and want to become student-friendly employers championing best practice in student employment.
RSA-funded Migration Inter-Connectivity and Regional Development (MICaRD) International Research Network
Agnieszka is also a co-founder and co-lead of the RSA-funded Migration, Inter-Connectivity and Regional Development (MICaRD) International Research Network (http://lncn.ac/migration ) that brought together scholars, policymakers and practitioners across Europe to provide a forum for debating current and emerging issues on European economic migration, foster collaboration and expand research opportunities. A total of seven research events were organised through RSA MICaRD network (2016-2023): Belfast (2016), Belgrade (2016), Warsaw (2017), L’Aquila (2020), Lincoln (2018 and 2022) and Komotini (2023).
Chavan Kissoon
Speaker
Lecturer in Digital Education, University of Lincoln
Chavan’s research explores the role of educational data governance in contemporary UKHE, working students and their experiences of social mobility, and what learning metrics can tell us about the student experience and student attainment outcomes.
Prior to joining the School of Education in September 2022, Chavan was part of the Digital Education and Student Experience team, the Educational Development and Enhancement Unit and the Work Based Distance Learning team (part of the Lincoln International Business School). More details below.
Chavan started at the University of Lincoln in 2013 as an e-Learning Content Developer on the Work Based Distance Learning (WBDL) provision. In WBDL, Chavan worked on both the military and civilian education portfolios and was responsible for improving the student experience by driving enhancement to the online learning environment.
In 2014, Chavan was promoted to a university-wide role in the newly created Educational Development and Enhancement Unit (EDEU) as a Digital Education Developer. In EDEU, he was the lead Digital Education Developer for the College of Social Science and Lincoln International Business School and led on the institution-wide rollout of the Panopto lecture recording system and the Authorship academic integrity tool.
In 2020, Chavan was promoted to Senior Digital Education Developer in the Digital Education and Student Experience team. In that role, serving a university of 15,000+ students, he led the University’s team of Digital Education Developers and was responsible for operationally managing Lincoln’s learning technology provision (Blackboard, Turnitin, Panopto, Poll Everywhere, H5P, Padlet and more)
Marie Lawson
Speaker
Senior Lecturer, Department of Management, University of Lincoln
Marie Lawson is a Senior Lecturer in Management in the Department of Management at the University of Lincoln. She is an Academic Associate of the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) and an Associate Member of the Institute of Hospitality (IoH). Her teaching focuses on management and human resource management topics and she takes a particular interest in employment in the visitor economy, namely the management of well-being of employees within the sector. Her current doctoral research is based on volunteering in the visitor economy.
Dr Mahdieh Zeinali
Speaker
Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Enterprise, Department of Management, University of Lincoln
Dr. Mahdieh Zeinali is a senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln where she teaches a range of Enterprise, Strategy and Human Resource Management modules at the Undergraduate and Postgraduate levels. Her research explores the experience of EU8 migrant women entrepreneurs in peripheral areas of the UK.
Her research uses an ‘intersectional’ lens to understand how gender and ethnicity intersect to disadvantage migrant women entrepreneurs in the job market. It draws on the concept of ’embedding’ to argue how migrant women’s experience of being disadvantaged (re)shapes their entrepreneurial journey, their career trajectories and ultimately their embedding into the different socio-spatial networks. Moreover, her research helps to understand how different embedding strategies determine the extent to which migrant women access different types of social capital to support their business activities.
The business angle to the research is based on the premise that entrepreneurship is increasingly aligned with social networks and social value creation, not just economic profits. Therefore, business in this sense provides a profound grounding for social interaction and engagement with local communities which can offer routes to integration and embedding for migrants.
Magdalena Read
MBA, FHEA, PGDip, PGCert, QTLS, BEEd, MCMI
Speaker
Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Management,, Department of Management, University of Lincoln
Magdalena (known to many as Magda) is a highly qualified and experienced academic with a strong track record in implementing practice-based learning. She specialises in Organizational Behaviour/Development, Management, Decision-making, Leadership, Community organisations, Employability, Equality issues and Entrepreneurship. Prior to joining the academia in 2018, Magda was running a number of consultancy businesses in organisational and business development that she founded. She also held various strategic and operational roles with Government Departments (both UK and abroad), local authorities, NGOs and private companies, some of which are part of Fortune 500.
Magda currently teaches on postgraduate and undergraduate programmes at Lincoln International Business School, leads on a number of postgraduate modules and Co-Programme Lead for MSc International Business. She is also a member of Lincoln UNESCO Chair for Responsible Foresight for Sustainable Development and leads on two international projects in gender and entrepreneurship. She is on the way to completing her PhD on community groups’ decision-making.
Dr Siobhan Wray
Speaker
Associate Professor in Organisational Behaviour, Department of Management, University of Lincoln