Our presenters

Joyce Macfarlane has 25+ years’ experience of business and education management. She has steered multi-disciplinary teams to build their effectiveness, organisational and personal.  She has in-depth knowledge and understanding of leadership and organisation change within complex organisations in education, public, voluntary and private sectors. 

A qualified coach and competent leader of people and processes her forte is ‘partnering’ strategic teams to tackle the key challenges of improving provision, raising quality and strengthening partnership working by developing leadership capacity.  Joyce has developed a highly effective coaching process to assist senior leaders and their work teams achieve their goals.

Her specialtiesare: Organisation Development & Education Consultancy; Inclusion & Diversity; Leadership Coaching/Mentoring; Advanced Training Skills; and support to internal Human Resource teams.

 Drawn to activities and projects that make the workplace a fulfilling and rewarding experience for all involved, Joyce has been a volunteer Director of West London Business, specialising in Human Resources and SMEs, since 1997.

As head of Grant Thornton Talent solutions offering, Justin's role is to work with employers to engage, manage and develop their talent to keep pace and remain successful in an environment which is evolving at an unprecedented rate. From a personal perspective he shares Grant Thornton’s passion for supporting initiatives aimed at providing opportunities for young people from diverse backgrounds.

As an ambassador in the cornerstone partnership with the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy, Justin works with this fantastic charitable foundation established to help equip a future generation of entrepreneurs develop the skills and mind-set to run their own businesses. He also supports the ‘Ladder for London’ campaign, an apprenticeship programme for 16- to 24-year-olds in East London who are not in full time education, employment or training as well as being actively involved in working with schools and local authorities as part of the school leaver programme.

Kathryn is the Head of Corporate Social Responsibility for Cisco UK & Ireland, leading and enabling innovative CSR initiatives across the organisation: engaging employees, benefiting the business and supporting Cisco’s not for profit partners.   Kathryn joined Cisco in 1997 and prior to her current role led marketing communications teams in Australia and the UK as well as leading the global web marketing team managing a team spread from China to the west coast of the US publishing Cisco’s 86 global websites in 40 languages.   

Kathryn is vice-Chair of the board of trustees of Berkshir Womens Aid and seeks to use her professional experience to support BWA.  Kathryn is a trained mental health first aider and has recently joined the advisory board of Brighter Berkshire, which aims to help reduce stigma about mental health & improve local opportunities through engaging people locally in conversations about mental health, helping to normalise and give parity to mental health issues.

Katie Hobbs founded KatchUp following a conversation around the kitchen table with her family. They wanted an easier way to share photos that could be used by all generations, but they didn’t want to compromise on privacy or image quality.

Aged 23, Katie won a government grant to prototype the idea for KatchUp and went on to build and grow the technical team she needed to take her product to the market. Katie loves collaborating with like-minded entrepreneurs and is passionate about supporting and promoting women in tech. She founded Link West in April 2015, which is a community for tech and creative entrepreneurs in West London. 

Kelvin Campbell runs the Smart Urbanism social network and Massive Small, a compendium of ‘bottom up’ change projects. He is visiting professor at University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and visiting lecturer in Sustainable Urban Development at Oxford University. His team did also policy work - The London Popular Home Initiative - a few years back for the Mayor of London on optimum home sizes / densities. 

Ken Livingstone is a British politician, who made constitutional history on May 4, 2000, when he was elected mayor of London—the first time that British voters had directly elected a candidate to an executive office at any level of government. He served as mayor until May 2008.

Before being elected as mayor of London, he was an active Labour Party Member by his early 20s. He was elected to the Lambeth Borough Council in 1971 and to the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1973. Between 1977 and 1981, when the GLC was run by members of the Conservative Party, Livingstone led a left-wing faction within Labour’s group in the GLC. 

Kersten is a partner in our Real Estate & Construction team at Grant Thornton in London. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and an expert in UK and international tax. He works extensively with UK and international investors and developers on their investments into property.

Kersten is actively involved in our Vibrant Economy initiative, in particular focussed on housing. He is using his experience and expertise of having worked across different European countries to bring ideas and focus to the issues faced in the UK, and how the wider skills of our firm can be utilised in moving forward.

Khushnama Davar leads the Digital Initiatives [DLT, Third Party Platforms, Fintech Engagements] in the global Product & Propositions Team in Global Trade & Receivables Finance at HSBC.

Her last role was as the Managing Director & Head Trade, at Standard Chartered Bank, India. She was responsible for overall Trade business including driving the P&L, strategy, sales and product management across the banks’ network in India.

She has a rich experience spanning 25+ years in Transaction Banking spanning across Citibank, Deutsche Bank and SCB/ANZ Grindlays Bank. She is a seasoned transaction Banker who is uniquely placed to offer a perspective based on her experience across different organizations and roles/experiences including country and regional roles covering India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

She holds a Masters in Banking & Finance from the University of Mumbai, is a Graduate of the Institute of Cost and Works Accountant and a Fellow of the Indian Bankers Association.

She is passionate about harnessing technology to deliver a fantastic Customer Experience and facilitating provocative conversations with individuals and teams around persistence, adding value, relationships, technology and making it happen!

She is married to Zubin and has one son. She enjoys travelling, reading, music and sports.

Konnie Huq is a British television presenter and writer. She was educated at Notting Hill & Ealing High School in London and left school with nine GCSEs and A-levels in physics, mathematics and chemistry. She studied sciences for her A-Levels, but chose to study economics at Robinson College, Cambridge and graduated from Cambridge University with a 2:1 degree.

Konnie is best known for presenting the BBC children's television programme Blue Peter, which she joined on 1 December 1997. One of her most memorable early moments on Blue Peter was visiting Bangladesh, and speaking to members of her extended family whom she had not seen for many years. Konnie has also been a celebrity ambassador for the British Red Cross, for which she recorded the video "If I had HIV, would you kiss me?" as part of a campaign against stigmatisation of people living with HIV. She hosted the West London Business Awards 2017.

Lara joined Marks & Clerk in 2012 in the electronics group. She qualified as a UK Chartered Patent Attorney and a European Patent Attorney in 2016. Since joining Marks & Clerk, Lara has had experience drafting and prosecuting patent applications relating to a wide range of technologies, including in particular cryptography, telecommunications, signal processing, machine learning, optical devices and semiconductor devices. She also assists in preparing standards essentiality evaluations for European Patents. Lara acts on behalf of clients of all sizes, from individual inventors, through to SMEs and large multinationals and has experience prosecuting applications in multiple jurisdictions including Europe, the US, China and Japan.

Lara graduated from Durham University in 2007 with a first class degree in Physics. She went on to obtain a PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2011. Her PhD involved studying itinerant electron systems under extreme conditions such as high pressure and low temperature, with a focus on resistivity and synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction measurements.