Chairman’s Report to AGM, 25 June 2015
- Central England Branch enjoyed an excellent lecture/event programme during 2014/15 with the venue for lectures mainly being our regular place at Milton Park, local to UKAEA’s Harwell site. One such a lecture on ‘Fusion Energy: Can Smaller be Better?’ was preceded by a tour of Spherical Tokamak at Tokamak Energy. This tour was attended by more than 50 people. Once again the YGN Young Speaker competition proved to be a popular event and attracted five excellent candidates. The first prize was awarded to Simon Lemin from TUV SUD Nuclear Technologies. Simon gave an excellent presentation entitled “Assurance: Making Mountains out of Molehills”. Simon will represent CEB at the grand final later this year.
- The levels of Membership and in particular the growth of membership in all grades remains an area of concern. This issue has been highlighted at each monthly lecture asking non-member attendees to consider joining the NI. This year’s AGM was planned to be attended by the NI’s Chief Executive, John Warden, to share with members the current strategic direction of the NI; describing Institute’s ‘2020 Vision’, which is to increase membership to 7,000 by the year 2020. Unfortunately John cannot attend the AGM because of personal reasons. I would like to take this opportunity to urge members (and non-members) to use the Branch activities to seek help and advice on all aspects of membership and I am very keen to make this a feature of every meeting.
- The Branch Annual Dinner in October last year was an excellent event. This was attended by more than 120 guests from the industry and academia.The key note speaker at the dinner was the NI President Rear Admiral Tim Chittenden and our after-dinner speaker was Commodore John Corderoy. The Branch dinner raised over £4,000 for the NI Charity. It also raised about £1,200 at its charity raffle competition.This was equally divided between Oxford Maggie’s Cancer and Abingdon’s Stroke Club charities. A provisional booking has been made at the Oxford Spires Four Pillars Hotel (last year’s venue) for the 8th October 2015. The success of the annual dinner provides an essential source of funding for the NI. Please consider attending the event or raise awareness of it within your company.
- The Nuclear Institute is of course now well established but there is still a lot of work to do, particularly at branch level, to ensure that the NI provides an excellent service to the members. In my capacity as a member of ‘Strategy Development Committee’ of the NI, I have been working together with trustees to develop the NI forward strategy. Our aim is to ensure growing membership and that membership of the NI provides the ‘Nuclear Delta’ which other professional bodies cannot provide.
- I would like to thank the Branch Committee for their excellent work.
- Finally, my personal thanks go out to members for supporting Branch activities throughout the year. Please do not hesitate to contact me directly should you have any comments regarding Branch activities or indeed if you would like to join the Branch Committee.
Mehdi Askarieh
Chairman, Central England Branch of the Nuclear Institute
**In the course of proceedings of the AGM, the following were unanimously elected as formal officers (official representatives) of the CEB:
Dr Mehdi Askarieh Branch Chairman
Mrs Therese Kehoe Branch Treasurer (Finance Officer)
Mr Miguel Woolley-Cardoso Branch Secretary
Branch Committee 2015
Mehdi Askarieh (Chairman)
Antonio Guida (Membership)
Therese Kehoe (Treasurer)
Kevin Langley (Events Adviser)
Roy Manning (Trustee)
David Murray (Education and Training)
John Williams (Events Co-ordinator)
Miguel Woolley-Cardoso (Secretary)