The Judging Panel

David Gilbertson

Chief Executive Officer, Emap

David joined Emap as CEO on the company's acquisition by Apax Partners and Guardian Media Group in March 2008. He has 30 years' experience in the information industry including editorial and management positions with Metal Bulletin, Reuters, Reed Elsevier and Informa. He was a member of the 3i-backed management buy-out team which bought LLP from Lloyd's of London in 1995, becoming CEO in 1997. He took LLP to flotation on the London Stock Exchange in early 1998, and, on its merger with IBC, became CEO of Informa Group plc He was appointed managing director on the merger of Informa and Taylor & Francis in May 2004, and was reappointed as Chief Executive of Informa plc in 2007.

Peter Rigby

Chief Executive Officer, Informa Group

Peter Rigby is the CEO of Informa Plc, a position he has held since 1989 before which he was the Finance Director. 

Originally an accountant but now cured, he has seen Informa grow from a private business environment to one which is now on the cusp of the FTSE100 .  The growth has been from both publishing and event acquisitions, the most notable being Taylor & Francis and IIR.   As well as his business interests, Peter is a keen sportsman and anyone fancying a football or cricket challenge should get in touch.

Neil Stewart

Chief Executive Officer, Neil Stewart Associates

Neil is a former Director of Communications for the Royal College of Nursing, a post he held between 1984 and 1989.  From 1989-1992 he was Political Secretary to the then Labour leader, Rt Hon Neil Kinnock MP.  He established Neil Stewart Associates in 1992.  Neil Stewart is a former President of the National Union of Students.  He has a postgraduate qualification in Communications, Advertising and Marketing and is a member of the Institute of Public Relations.

He is Chairman and Chief Executive of Neil Stewart Associates.  Was the founder and chair of Stewart Productions Limited, 1995-1998, Worked for Informa PLC from 1998—2001 to whom he had sold Stewart Productions Ltd. Facilitated a buyout and was a Director of Parliamentary Communications Ltd, publisher of the House Magazine and Holyrood Magazine 2001-2002.  Bought out NSA from PCL in 2002 .  He is Chairman of Policy Review TV Ltd, an online TV company.  He is publisher of Policy Review Magazine, a Director and Shareholder of Editorial Intelligence Ltd and a board member of the King’s Fund subsidiary KEHF Limited.

Greg Hitchen

Group Chief Executive Officer, Terrapinn

Greg Hitchen has enjoyed the global events industry for the last twenty two years. In Australasia, USA, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe.

He has been Chief Executive Officer of Terrapinn since 1999.

Blog: http://blogs.terrapinn.com/terraplane

Ruth Carter

Chief Executive Officer, UBM Conferences

Ruth was previously Managing Director of CMPi’s Conference Division from March 2007 until her appointment as Chief Executive Officer for Conferences in July 2008. She is responsible for conferences around the world, working closely with senior management, Publishers and Event Directors to create major launches from our unrivalled content and customer communities. Ruth has also held responsibility for CMPi’s Audience and Data Group. Before joining CMPi, Ruth was Managing Director of Emap’s b2b conference business where she grew this enterprise from scratch to one of the most successful and highly respected conference business around. Prior to Emap, Ruth was with IIR for 5 years where she managed businesses in London and North America.

Andrew Brown

Group Chief Executive Officer, World Trade Group

Andrew co-founded wtg in 1997 and has overseen its growth from a start-up publishing company to one of the fastest growing events businesses in the world, achieving the coveted Sunday Times Fastrack 100 award in 2010 for International sales. Since Andrew assumed the role of Group Chief Executive Officer in 2008 the business has enjoyed exceptional profit growth of 125%. Andrew was previously joint MD and prior to that was Chief Executive Officer of an acquisition business which he took from liquidation to a contributor of 40% of group profits in 3 years. As Group Chief Executive Officer Andrew is now responsible for group strategy and growth, working with the senior management team, CFO and Global Sales Director to commercialise new business opportunities and expand the business.

Prior to wtg Andrew headed up a conference division at SPG Media and had production roles at IQPC and Business Intelligence.

Susie Bacon

Managing Director, Capita Conferences, Capita Plc

Susie joined Capita in 2003, becoming the MD of Capita Conferences in 2005, when it became an autonomous business division within Capita Plc.  Susie has re-invented the business: Capita Conferences has grown dramatically since 2005, with revenue increasing almost five fold in five years, delegate averages quadrupling, and the number of events reaching 240 in 2010.  This expansion has transformed Capita Conferences in to one of the biggest providers of conferences to the public sector in the UK.  Furthermore, this growth has all been achieved organically.

The success of Capita Conferences owes much to the ability to innovate, to identify strong new areas at the right time, and to originate new and unusual ideas for content.  This has been done very effectively, in areas such as the Police, Housing, Social Services, Education, Health, Employment, and Local Government.  Content has been also diversified through introducing new modes of delivery, including: half day briefings, workshops, interactive seminars and high level one day sponsorship events, as well as one day conferences.

Susie’s previously positions include spells at PCL and at Haymarket Conferences.  Susie lives in Kent with her sculptor husband and new twin boys, who are proving almost as challenging as running a Conferences business!

Rachel Foley

Managing Director, Centaur Conferences

Rachel has been working at Centaur Media as Managing Director of the Conference business since 2005, growing both delegate and sponsorship revenues through building a portfolio of premium quality events, powered by some of the UK's most dominant B2B publication and online brands, including Marketing Week and The Lawyer.

Before joining Centaur, Rachel held various Director-level, P&L roles in Conference and Training businesses globally, including 11 years at IIR, based in both the UK and the US.

Rachel is an alumnus of Warwick University where she received a BSc in Engineering and Business Studies.  She lives in London and is married with twins.

Luke Gibson

Managing Director, Euromoney Seminars & Metal Bulletin Events, Euromoney Institutional Investor

Luke is Managing Director of Euromoney Seminars and Metal Bulletin Events. He has been with Euromoney for six years overseeing businesses in London, Singapore and Hong Kong. During his time with Euromoney he has been involved with the launch of over 100 new conferences. His teams run events in six continents on all aspects of banking and finance, metals and business management.

Jayne Van Hoen

Managing Director, Financial Times Global Conferences & Events

An energetic and entrepreneurial ‘business shaper’ with a total of 19 years experience gained in global media, publishing and conferences and events. Based in New York Jayne leads the Financial Times Conferences, Awards and Strategic Forums Commercial Business Division responsible for the sales, marketing, research, development and execution of 60+ events per year across the globe from LA to Beijing.  The events provide unrivalled, agenda-setting programs and the pre-eminent decision-makers, visionaries and strategists across industries and economies worldwide. Under Jayne’s leadership the team has grown from 6 staff  in London in 2005 to 28 marketing, operations, editorial and sales professionals  based in Hong Kong, London and New York. Previously as a self employed management consultant, Jane worked for a number of media organizations including: The Financial Times, Euromoney Institutional investor, IIR and IQPC to enhance business performance through brand, sales and content.   She has also worked at Hemscott, Thomspon Reuters, Adam Smith Institute and Haymarket publishing.

Nadim Chaudhry

Managing Director, Green Power Conferences

Nadim has 16 years experience in running global business to business conferences, firstly for the IBC/Informa Telecoms Division in the UK and Brazil. In 2003 he founded Green Power Conferences with a mission to help commercialise renewable energy technologies and fight climate change via event media.

GPC now runs over 50 leading events across 30+ countries including Europe’s largest biofuels congress and the previous speaker list includes Al Gore, Bob Geldof, Lord Browne amongst others. In 2009 he oversaw the launch of the Green Power Academy which has developed the capability to deliver a broad portfolio of renewable energy training course content and will see over 30 courses delivered in 2010.

Ros Oxley

Managing Director, ICBI

Rosalind Oxley has been in the conference business for 25 years. She started when the IIR London office first opened in 1985 and has held a wide range of positions within IIR. In 2005 IIR was sold to Informa and Rosalind has stayed with the group, responsible for an ever increasing number of businesses within Informa. She is currently responsible for 7 business groups within Informa – ICBI (large scale events); IFF (financial training events); Adam Smith (Russian events), IIR UK Finance (finance, tax and legal events), Informa Maritime & Energy; Infoline (compliance events); Maritime, Trade & Energy Distance Learning. During her career in IIR/Informa she has launched new businesses, acquired and managed new businesses and turned around failing operations, and achieved a significant dominance in all the areas of her businesses.

Michael Foreman

Managing Director, Kenes UK

Michael Foreman started working in the Congress Industry in 1996 for Kenes Group (Kenes International) as the Director of the Registration Dept. In 2001 he relocated to the UK and gained more professional experience working for a UK based PCO.

Since then he has worked on congresses and exhibitions around the globe in various roles. He has expertise in every aspect of organising from registration through to industry sales, systems implementation and financial control. With an extensive worldwide network of contacts in the Industry, the natural progression in his career was for Michael to be instrumental in setting up Confab Consulting with his two co-directors in 2003. In the summer of 2009 Confab joined forces with the Kenes Group and is now proud to be known as Kenes UK. Michael is a full member and current Vice Chair of the Association of British Professional Congress Organisers. (www.abpco.org)

Jonathan Dewe

Director of Conferences & Programmes, Economist Conferences

Jonathan Dewe is Director of Conferences and Events for The Economist Group in London. Jonathan has over 18 years experience of running high profile conferences in over 36 countries around the world. Prior to joining The Economist, Jonathan worked for an investor relations agency and headed Euromoney Conferences in both London and New York before leaving to earn an MBA from Cranfield School of Management.

Pauline Coulter

Head of Events, Association of Corporate Treasurers (ACT)

With over 12 years experience in commercial events, Pauline was previously with Datamonitor, Lafferty and Informa.

In 2006, Pauline joined the ACT – Association of Corporate Treasurers – as Head of Events and has been responsible for increasing event profit by 40%, and doubling the scale of the annual conference to over 900 attendees and 60 exhibitors. In that time, she has built a further portfolio of 40 events, half of which are overseas, and range from free to attend sponsored breakfasts to full scale conference and exhibitions.

Pauline is part of a senior management team to drive international development and has recently also taken on responsibility for growing the training business.

Nina Harman

Head of Events, CIPD

Nina Harman is Head of Conferences, Events and Exhibitions at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). The CIPD is Europe's largest HR and development professional body with over 135,000 members.   Nina oversees the design, development and delivery of the CIPD’s annual programme of events ranging from topical one day conferences to the flagship Annual Conference and Exhibition which has recently moved to Manchester. Last year more than 11, 000 people attended CIPD conferences and exhibitions.   She joined the CIPD in 2003 as Conference Manager and prior to that was a Senior Conference Producer at the Institute of Directors.

Victoria Rennie

Group Events Director, Incisive Media

Victoria Rennie is Group Events Director at Incisive Media, a leading B2B information provider serving the financial and professional services markets globally.  Incisive has a varied and diverse events business, with over 500 events taking place annually across 28 countries, and Victoria’s team is responsible for the creation and delivery of the company’s entire events portfolio.

Victoria began her career in events at Risk Waters Group where she managed the company’s conference production team.  She has also held a General Manager position at Terrapinn where she headed up the rapidly expanding Finance Division, specialising in conferences for the hedge fund, asset management and private equity industries.

Victoria had previously worked for Incisive Media from 2003, when it acquired Risk Waters Group, until 2004.  In 2006 she re-joined the company and has since been instrumental in the growth of Incisive’s events business, both via organic growth and acquisition. 

Fiona Miller

Head of Conferences, LexisNexis

Fiona Miller is responsible for conferences & training at LexisNexis®, the leading global provider of world-class content, information analytics and workflow solutions for professionals in the legal, risk management, corporate, government, law enforcement, accounting and academic markets.

Working closely with customers to deliver new learning solutions such as Lexis® Learning, a component of Lexis® Legal Intelligence and Tax Intelligence, Fiona doesn’t like to sit still. A pioneer of online training, Fiona last year built an in-house multi-media studio to support Lexis’s fast growing webinars portfolio, which in 2009 attracted over 25,000 fee paying viewers.

Previously Fiona worked at Emap for 3 years and Informa for 6 years where she was responsible for driving significant growth in F2F conferences in a broad range of large conference divisions including the public sector, retail, fashion, media, plastics, construction and pensions. www.conferencesandtraining.co.uk

Gemma Fawcett

General Manager, Arena International

Gemma joined Arena International Events Group as General Manager in January 2009 where she has strategic oversight of 50 events spanning Europe, North America and Asia. After graduating from The University of Durham, Gemma joined SMi Conferences Ltd as a Pharmaceutical Conference Producer before moving on to Worl Trade Group in 2003 where she was instrumental in the growth and launch of a multiple Large Scale Events covering a wide variety of industries. After several years in this post she was seconded to the role of Vice President, Production for WTG North America where she was responsible for the delivery of all US events. During her tenure she doubled the product portfolio, expanded into new markets and enhanced product quality before returning to London and joining Arena International Events Group.

Rory Ross Russell

Managing Director, R3 Events

Rory joined International Business Communications (IBC) Ltd in 1989 and worked in various roles before becoming Marketing Director of IBC USA in Boston in the late 1990’s. He returned to the UK in 2001 to take up the role of Group Marketing Director of the recently formed Informa Group. He later started and became MD of a new division called Informa Alliances which specialised in partnerships with third parties.

He set up his own business called R3 Ltd in 2008 which runs joint venture conferences with publishers, exhibition organisers and associations who are in a strong position to run conferences but do not possess the in-house expertise. Rory is one of the founding partners of the Conference Awards.

Claire Wormsley

Managing Director, The Media House

Claire joined IIR in 1991 and her roles included heading up the legal and tax division before moving to Risk Magazine where she set up and ran their conferences, large-scale events, training and book publishing. She was a board director at Risk. Claire was responsible for the development of their conference and training business in Europe, Asia and the US.

Claire set up The Media House in 1997. It provides training, coaching and roundtables to the conference and events industry. In the last three years over 200 conference companies, publishing houses and associations have received training from The Media House. Claire is one of the founding partners of the Conference Awards.