The UK Manufacturing Forum
The UK Manufacturing Forum is an annual event that brings together top representatives of manufacturing, academia and government. Its purpose is to debate and refine policy ideas that can feed back into the government policymaking system. In its second year, the management of the Forum has been taken over by the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and the Institute for Manufacturing at the University of Cambridge.
ManufacturingTV was asked to document proceedings through a series of interviews conducted at the event and a ‘wrap up’ conversation with Chris Dungey, CTO at HVMC and Professor Tim Minshall of the IfM. We will shortly be publishing the interviews, together with a short series of vox pops about the importance of the event and the wrap up with Chris Dungey and Tim Minshall. First though, please do watch this interview with a remarkable young woman, Maya Ghazal, whose story is as instructive about the diversity challenges facing industry as it is inspiring.
An Engineer Against All odds
Maya Ghazal came to the UK in 2015 as a refugee from Syria. Today she is a Graduate Research Engineer at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry. As if that isn’t enough of a story, she also had to overcome the kind of prejudice that the manufacturing sector desperately wants to get rid of. She was told she’d never make it in industry because she’s a woman and an Arab. It was prejudice that made her even more determined to succeed.