Julie Bellingham

Julie Bellingham is the UK ESS Industry Liaison Officer (ILO) and works for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the UK. Her role is the Head of Business Opportunities for International Facilities and she manages a team to help industry engage with the international research facilities funded by STFC. Julie has previously worked with the neutron community as following her PhD in physics, she managed the EU project NMI3 in Framework Programme 6 before moving to more industry facing roles in STFC.

- STFC is a partner in BrightnESS and I became involved in Work Package 6 due to my role as the UK ILO to ESS. Among other things, my work includes engaging with industry to help them work with the ESS and interacting with the other ILOs to share best practice. These activities align well with the activities of Work Package 6.

In BrightnESS, our team is planning an ESS Industry Day for the UK to make UK companies aware of the opportunities at ESS. We also worked in collaboration with our ISIS research centre and our colleagues in the Netherlands to conduct surveys with industry users to help ESS understand what the important features for potential industry users are.

I think that collaborative projects such as BrightnESS are a good way to develop ideas and new ways of thinking and it is really useful to build stronger links, for example in the ILO network. Through BrightnESS, we arranged a meeting with the Netherlands’ ILO for the North-West hub and this was a great way of sharing ideas and ways of working.

A key challenge for BrightnESS in the UK is ensuring that our messages are appropriate for the audiences. We have a strong user community in the UK and so the message to those users is different than if you were trying to build and develop a community from the beginning. We are working with ESS through BrightnESS to develop messages for established communities.