Salters’ Alumni present at Technician Conferences

This year, the Institute team were delighted to support three of our technician alumni to present at national conferences: SciTechConf Science and DT Technicians’ Conference on 26th June 2026 in Birmingham, and the ASE Technicians Summer Conference on 3rd July in Bristol. These were both wonderful events celebrating the vital work of science technicians and a great opportunity for us to hear more about the experiences of technicians across the UK.

At SciTechConf, we were supporting alumni Paul Cook and Angie Ridout (Technician Award winners in 2015 and 2024, respectively), who delivered sessions about Leadership and Management of Science Prep Rooms. Their sessions were popular with delegates and gave the attendees a great opportunity to learn about prep room management styles and discuss any challenges they face in their own prep rooms. Other highlights of the event included welcome talks from John Booth, conference organiser, and Steve Jones, Director at CLEAPSS, as well as a huge array of informative sessions on offer across all three science disciplines.

At the ASE Technicians Summer Conference, we were supporting Rachel Gibson (Technician Award winner in 2025) to deliver a session titled ‘Science clubs: A carousel of fun and engaging experiments’. This was a great session with lots of hands-on demonstrations for attendees to try out. Rachel had clearly put a lot of effort into testing the experiments and was on hand to answer questions about how to run a science club, possible funding routes and her experience as a recent Salters’ Technician Award winner. The team attended several other interesting workshops throughout the day including on chromatography, integrating careers into practicals and microscale experiments.

As well as supporting Rachel’s session, we also funded free places for technicians from schools in disadvantaged areas to attend for free through the ASE’s Keeping Science Practical Programme. We look forward to hearing about how they benefitted from attending the conference.

We chatted with lots of technicians at both conferences about the challenges they face and their successes, and promoted our Technician Awards – which is now open for applications until Wednesday 23rd September 2026!

We are so delighted to have had three of our technician alumni present at these conferences on behalf of the Salters’ Institute; a huge well done and thank you to Angie, Paul and Rachel for delivering such engaging and interesting sessions.