We’re pleased to introduce you to our UK Bamboo Summit 2026 Speakers and Contributors.
They are listed in first name, alphabetical order.
Anna Bright
Chief Executive, Sustainability West Midlands
Anna Bright has spent more than 30 years developing and delivering solutions to environmental, economic and social challenges through collaboration across the public, private and voluntary sectors. Anna has been Chief Executive of Sustainability West Midlands since 2016, leading an independent, purpose-driven organisation that works with over 200 cross-sector members to accelerate sustainable and inclusive economic growth.
Chris Matthews
Associate Director of Atelier One
Member of Bamboo in the UK Group
Chris Matthews is an Associate Director at Atelier One, having joined the practice in 2011. Driven by material innovation and low-carbon design, he serves on the IStructE Sustainability Panel and actively champions the adoption of structural bamboo within the UK construction industry.
Chris specializes in complex geometries, timber, form-active gridshells, film engineering, and unusual structures. His portfolio spans the London 2012 Olympic Ceremonies staging, the award-winning Spaceframe carbon-fibre system, Jodrell Bank’s First Light Pavilion, the SEE Monster oil platform transformation, and the Kit Kat Club, alongside technical support for over 15 feature films and numerous global art installations.
Dann Carroll
Creative Producer, NoFit State Circus
Dann is Creative Producer for NoFit State Circus, the UK’s foremost contemporary touring circus company based in Cardiff, Wales. He works across all the Company’s projects, including programming and tour managing the outdoor show BAMBOO.
Dr. David Trujillo
Assistant Professor (R&T) in Humanitarian Engineering at University of Warwick
David is a chartered structural engineer with a passion for natural materials, particularly bio-based materials. He has dedicated his academic career to researching bamboo and professional career to design with timber. He believes that these materials do not only have much lower embodied carbon (with potentially negative carbon footprints), but also offer many societal and environmental benefits.
He also believes that researching so-called vernacular materials (such as bamboo) has the potential to empower communities and engineers in the Global South to use these for safe and modern solutions. He says “We need to educate future professionals to use these resources, and to do so, we need to bring them to the mainstream, by creating standards and codes that permit us to put them on equal footing to steel and concrete.”
Dav Bansal
Partner, Howells
Vice-Chair, Open City
Dav is driven by a passion for helping regional towns and cities to meet their potential and ensure they play their pivotal role in the UK, promoting healthy environments, active movement, and quality of place. His integrity of exploring ideas to make places for landscaping and buildings is considered both at macro and micro scales.
Dav joined Howells in 1999 and became a Partner in 2015. He leads the Birmingham studio and oversees the design of major urban regeneration projects including delivery of Birmingham’s Paradise development in the city’s civic heart, along with the Curzon/HS2 and Martineau Galleries masterplans in the east. He has significant experience in residential and commercial sectors including award-winning schemes such as The Octagon, Port Loop, Two Chamberlain Square and One Centenary Way in Birmingham as well as One St Peter’s Square and 125 Deansgate in Manchester.
He regularly sits on award panels and is currently a judge for the Housing Design Awards and Architecture Today’s Test of Time awards. Dav has previously judged awards for the British Council for Offices and the RIBA (national and international) along with being a speaker for the RIBA Future Leaders programme.
He is Vice-Chair of Open City, a member of Design Midlands and the Quality Review Panel for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and was recently appointed as an expert panel member for TfWM’s (Transport for West Midlands) Design Excellence programme. Dav sits on the Design and Placemaking Advisory Panel for the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government Design and Placemaking.
Gemma Thomas
Director, Brilliant Bamboo
Co-convenor of the Bamboo in the UK Group & UK Bamboo Summit
Gemma is a Creative Director and Producer, from and working in, Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire. Gemma’s work starts from the belief that there is power in people working together, often creatively, to create change in how we see and feel about places. She has worked across the Midlands, partnered locally, nationally and internationally throughout her career.
As the Director of Brilliant Bamboo, she has been collaborating to explore what opportunities working with and growing bamboo, for Stoke, North Staffs and national partners.
Harris Beider
Founder and CEO, The Forward Institute Birmingham
Harris Beider is a senior leader with experience across public, private, and non-profit sectors both in the UK and internationally. He holds a Politics degree from the University of Warwick and a PhD in Race and Housing from the University of Birmingham. Harris has held academic appointments at leading global universities such as Columbia in the US where he was nominated for the Presidential Teaching Prize, and Cambridge in the UK where he was a Bye-Fellow. His leadership roles include being Pro Vice-Chancellor at BCU and Bradford, and Academic Director and Professor of Community Cohesion at Coventry University.
In 2025, he founded The Forward Institute (www.forwardinstitute.co.uk ), a non-profit focused on revitalising Birmingham’s reputation through a radical and practical agenda. His earlier work in the third sector includes Executive Director of the Federation of Black Housing Organisations and National Director of People for Action. He has served on boards addressing youth homelessness and healthcare in Birmingham.
Born in Karachi and raised in inner-city Birmingham, Harris is committed to inclusive, collaborative leadership and community renewal.
Helen Chen
President, The Bamboo Society of Great Britain
Helen has been collecting bamboos for over 20 years since falling in love with them whilst living in China. The talk covers how bamboos grow, runners and clumpers, growing bamboos in containers, and looks at a good variety of different species, both those to avoid and those to look for.
To visit Helen’s blog: The Asian Garden U.K. Blog – Japonica Plants Nursery
Jennifer Snyders
President, Bamboo Soceity of Australia
CEO, House of Bamboo
CEO, Australian Bamboo Plantations
Jennifer Snyders is CEO of House of Bamboo®, founder of Australian Bamboo Plantations
and President of the Bamboo Society of Australia. An architect and World Bamboo
Ambassador, she purchased HOB in 2012, introduced engineered bamboo to its range and funds research with Deakin and UNSW toward its structural adoption. At the BSA she led the development of Bamboo Breakthrough, the roadmap to a commercial Australian bamboo industry by 2035, with Jeremy Mansfield OAM. Her goal is to see bamboo adopted as a serious regenerative material, grown and made in Australia.
Kavita Purohit
Environmental Engineer, Regenerative Ecomomics Researcher & Social-Ecological Systems Practitioner.
Kavita is an environmental engineer, regenerative economics researcher and social-ecological systems practitioner, deeply passionate about building a more ecologically safe and socially just world. They love bridging play and learning, translating complex systems into tangible actionable pathways, and being hands-on in a live project.
Image of Kavita by Angela Grabowska.
Manish Godkhindi
Founder & Director, Quantum G
World Bamboo Science
Manish Godkhindi is an Environmental & Nature Tech Entrepreneur applying Data and Artificial Intelligence to create new commercial and regenerative value across environmental and nature-based businesses.
As Founder and Director of Quantum G, he helps organisations turn sustainability and environmental challenges into opportunities for innovation, operational improvement and commercial value through Data, Technology and AI. His work includes advising private equity investors and portfolio companies across the environmental and AEC sectors on technology-enabled value creation and growth.
Quantum G is the Technology & AI Partner for World Bamboo Science, “The Intelligence to Investigate Bamboo as a Regenerative Resource.” Through this work, Manish is leveraging AI and digital intelligence to connect science, markets and expertise, helping unlock the regenerative and economic potential of bamboo and other natural resources at scale.
Neil Thomas MBE
Founder & Director, Atelier One
Neil Thomas is the Founder and Director of Atelier One, widely regarded as the UK’s most innovative engineering practice. Guided by fundamental structural principles rather than code over-reliance, his pioneering work spans diverse materials—from weight-saving carbon fibre for U2 touring stages to bamboo structures that earned the IStructE Supreme Award in 2023.
An influential educator, Neil has held visiting professorships at Yale, MIT, Leeds University, and Bamboo U in Bali. His distinguished contributions to architecture and engineering have been recognised with an MBE, Royal Designer for Industry election, an Honorary RIBA Fellowship, the IABSE Milne Medal, and the 2025 Ronald Sharp Medal.
Orit Azaz
Independent Creative Director, Imagine Bamboo
Co-convenor, Bamboo in the UK Group & UK Bamboo Summit
Orit Azaz is creative director of Imagine Bamboo, a public art, engagement and creative research initiative, now in its 6th year, that brings together artists, engineers, designers, environmentalists, researchers, policy makers and communities to explore the potential of UK-grown bamboo as a sustainable material and catalyst for positive social and environmental change.
Richard Lin
Bamboo International (Group) Co. Ltd
Richard Lin is a leading carbon strategist and sustainable innovation expert based in Hong Kong. He is pioneering the transformation of bamboo into a scalable, high-tech, data-driven climate solution to decarbonise the global building sector. A scholar at the University of Hong Kong, Richard lectures on carbon, LCA and green building, and currently leads cutting-edge research into advanced bamboo systems for coastal and marine applications.
Sara Blair-Manning
Chief Executive Officer, Birmingham Botanical Gardens.
Proud to be born into the Gypsy, Roma, and Traveller (GRT) community, Sara is a visionary and creative leader of heritage and cultural visitor attractions and large-scale capital investment projects. She is a Board Member of both the WMCA Tourism and Hospitality Advisory Board and The Greater Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, a University of Birmingham BISCA Associate (Birmingham Institute for Sustainability and Climate Action) and a regular guest lecturer on the Museum and Heritage Futures MA at Nottingham Trent University.
With over 37 years of ethical and sustainable leadership, she has been successful in establishing and managing effective, multi-disciplinary teams of staff and volunteers with a variety of lived experiences. She is passionate about diversity, inclusion and sustainability and has achieved success by working collaboratively with a wide range of stakeholders.
Sara demonstrates that a high quality, sustainable and accessible visitor offer leads to the long-term support of local assets and successful place making.
Simon Delahunty-Forrest
Director of Planning and Development, Birmingham City Council.
Simon started in local government as an apprentice architectural technologist with Birmingham City Council in June 1989.
Today Simon is the Director for Planning & Development within the Place, Prosperity and Sustainability Directorate for Birmingham City Council.
Having responsibility for ‘Specific Specialist Areas’ such as the City Design Team, Central Birmingham Planning Management, Northwest Planning Management and City-Wide Development Planning.
Simon is both a proud qualified Architect and Town Planner ‘Brummie’ and throughout his career to date, he has built a strong track record in transforming planning and development services and delivering major
regeneration initiatives across Birmingham.
As a qualified Architect Simon is also Birmingham City Council’s lead design advisor championing design quality within the built environment, encouraging and enabling the highest standards of Place Making, Planning and Development, Architecture and Urban Design across all new development in the City for the benefit of all the citizens of Birmingham.
Sundar Bharadwaj
Co-Founder & CEO, TERRAGRN
Sundar Bharadwaj is the Co-founder and CEO of TERRAGRN, a UK-headquartered enterprise pioneering large-scale landscape restoration and regenerative rural economies in South Africa. With a background in global leadership at Accenture and Vodafone, Sundar is passionate about turning environmental challenges into commercially viable opportunities.
TERRAGRN integrates bamboo agroforestry, biodiversity restoration, carbon finance and sustainable material value chains to regenerate degraded landscapes and create economic opportunities for local communities. In 2026, TERRAGRN was selected as one of 11 global winners of the World Economic Forum’s UpLink Scaling Land Restoration Innovation Challenge.
At the UK Bamboo Summit, Sundar will share TERRAGRN’s progress and bamboo’s potential as a sustainable industrial material.
Suzy Jones
Director of the Future, Urban Splash
Suzy Jones is known in the built environment for her approach to future facing strategic thinking, environmental social and governance expertise and applied research & innovation using live demonstrators and event-based engagement.
The trajectory of her career is somewhat unorthodox but Suzy has spent the past 15 years leading inter disciplinary teams and exploring design and the future of the built environment in the UK and abroad.
As the first Director of RIBA North, the Royal Institute of British Architects facility on the Liverpool Waterfront, Suzy establish a centre for research and innovation providing access to new knowledge and learning for the RIBA membership and other built environment professionals and the public. Whilst running RIBA North Suzy’s primary focus was the impact of Anthropocene change and the ways in which the profession could mitigate and adapt to changing planetary systems, through design.
After joining Urban Splash in 2020 Suzy established Future Lab, a research and innovation laboratory with a remit to look beyond immediate horizons at the ways in which we may want, and need to live, in the future. Suzy led teams of specialists exploring the impacts of societal, environmental and technological change on the design and development of homes and neighbourhoods. Suzy has recently taken on a more strategic role as Director of the Future for Urban Splash. Alongside her colleagues on the Executive Board, Suzy is responsible for steering the success of the Urban Splash group. Using foresight, future visioning and an implicit understanding of the Urban Splash brand, Suzy develops shareholder ambitions into deliverable strategy, drives innovation and delivers the business into a resilient and unique market position that ensures continued success.
