Profile

I live with my partner in Diggle a small village on the edge of Saddleworth moor. We have a crazy dog called Dora who we enjoy taking out for long walks in the local countryside.

I work within the Speedo innovation team, the Aqualab. My role is to find, develop or invent new textile technologies that we can use within our high performance sports ranges.

We like to look at all different types of textiles and convert them in order to make them suitable for swim. We have used lingerie fabrics, industrial fabrics, medical fabrics, architectural materials and much more to inspire our final performance textile

My role is to take the idea and make it suitable for our end use, making sure we stick within the rules of our sport. I need to make sure that we can make our invention in big volumes, that it is commercial and that it meets all the needs of our customer

I visit lots of textile mills around the world and work closely with them to make everything a success

The end result is seeing your product on the swimmer at major races and hopefully contributing in a small way to their success.

At the moment I am mainly working on the development of the material for the 2020 Olympic racing suit. We have done all of our research, looked at all of our options and decided on what we would like to make. I am now working closely with our development partners to weave and knit our requirements, I am also working with our chemical partners to work out how we want to finish the material. We then need to put the materials in to suits and get our global team of swimmers to test the material for us. The development cycle then begins again after we get the swimmers feedback.

I can either be found in the office; sending emails, testing fabrics, reviewing test results, sitting in meetings or drinking coffee or at a factory conducting trials on the looms / knitting machines or even occasionally by the pool working with the swimmers on finding out how the material is performing

In most schools textiles tends to be about knitting, embroidery, cotton. Textiles is so much more! I would want to try and show the engineered aspect of textiles where it can help you to perform your best, perhaps save your life, be used in automotive, aeronautical engineering and perhaps answer / be your phone.