Meet The Horizon Scanning Group Members
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David Topping
David Topping is a Professor of The Digital Environment. He has spent more than 20 years exploring and expanding the digital ecology that underpins environmental science.
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Gail Millin-Chalabi - Head of Digital Reach and Co-Lead of the CaDiR GIS, Mapping and Earth Observation Community
Gail Millin-Chalabi is Head of Digital Reach in the AI and Ideas Adoptions Directorate at The University of Manchester Library, where she leads initiatives that expand access to digital collections, research infrastructure, and emerging technologies. Her work focuses on connecting people, collections, and data through innovative digital services, with particular interests in AI adoption, digital transformation, geospatial technologies, and digital cultural heritage. She is currently leading strategic projects that enhance the discoverability, accessibility, and long-term sustainability of the Library's digital collections, helping researchers, students, and the public engage with cultural and scholarly resources in new ways.
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Jonathan Evason - Lead Platform Engineer for Campus Technology Solutions
I mainly oversee the CTS platform engineering team and helping us to create services and capabilities in cloud technologies. We're involved in several projects to varying degrees from Oracle Cloud to AWS and Azure, we also administer tooling and lead on DevOps initiatives.
We often create the foundational layer for application teams to make successful migrations to cloud so getting that right should reduce overheads and improve application services.
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Megan Lawless - Senior Digital Strategy Officer, Manchester City Council
Megan currently works on the delivery of Manchester’s Digital Strategy, which considers the impact of digital technologies on people, place, economies, and the environment. Megan’s role focuses on the role of digital in place, and how we can deliver the infrastructure Manchester needs in order to be a thriving tech-enabled and digitally inclusive city.
From data centres role in regeneration, to engaging with the public on telecoms, Megan is interested in how the physical assets that make up the digital world can help a city to grow and thrive with communities at the forefront.
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Stephen Longshaw - Director of the Computational Science Centre for Research Communities, UKRI STFC
Stephen is Director of the Computational Science Centre for Research Communities (CoSeC) and a member Scientific Computing’s Senior Leadership. He has a background in Computer Science and applied modelling and simulation.
He advocates for the value of computational research within UKRI and for the UK’s economy and Champions the role of organised research communities to enable it.
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Tony Curran - IT Operations Centre Manager, IT Services
I am the IT Operations Centre (ITOC) Manager within IT Services at The University of Manchester. ITOC provides 24x7 monitoring and operational oversight of the University's critical digital services, infrastructure and networks.
The team acts as the central point for detecting, triaging and coordinating responses to service disruptions, helping to minimise the impact of incidents on students, researchers and staff.
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