2024 Speakers
Rachael Ryan
Head of Global Research & Insights at TikTok
Rachael Ryan is a seasoned research professional with a deep fascination for human behavior. Her career spans various industries, including Technology, Ecommerce, Finance, Retail, and Government, where she has had the opportunity to collaborate with academia, Fortune 500 companies, and startups, focusing on creative and thought leadership research.
As Head of Research and Insights at TikTok, Rachael is dedicated to helping creators & brands understand how audiences, creativity, commerce, and culture evolve in a rapidly changing landscape. Her research uncovers insights that drive shifts in behavior, helping people connect in new and meaningful ways. A Galway native, Rachael now lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Aifric Keogh
Olympian
Aifric is a two time Olympian and an Olympic Bronze Medallist. She began rowing in 2006 in her 1st year of secondary school at Coláiste Iognáid or 'The Jes'. While the Olympic dream only came on the horizon in the latter half of her rowing career, she's always loved sports and enjoyed playing hockey and basketball while growing up. As is the case with most athletes, Aifric simultaneously trained at a high-performance level while also studying for a B.Sc degree in University College Galway, a M.Sc degree in University College Cork and an MBA degree in Trinity College Dublin. As a senior athlete on the team, Aifric has had the privilege over the last 10+ years of being a part of the most recent generation of successful athletes at Rowing Ireland, that have won countless World Championship, World Cup, European and even some Olympic medals along the way.
Áine Gallagher
Artist & Comedian
Áine Gallagher describes herself as a person, an artist, a comedian and a ribbon enthusiast. She has been coined, "the queen of the offbeat", as her unique style of storytelling guarantees audiences a "divinely awkward" experience. Áine has been working as a professional stand up comedian for the past 10 years and is best known for her use of humour to make the Irish language accessible for everyone. As the subject of the award winning documentary "Grá & Eagla" and the director of the new mini documentary series "Hairy Stories", Áine continues to pave her way and tell her stories using her wholly individual style. Her dry and deadpan persona has been compared to the likes of Maria Bamford and Kevin McAleer. Her work is ultimately guided by her passion to share her joy of the mundanity of life and bring people together through stories and laughter.
Louise Lally
Trainer & Mentor
Louise is founder of The Training Academy, having worked in Leadership roles within the Retail sector for many years and having qualifications in HR and Training and Development she encompasses these elements into her Retail Training.
Louise was mentoring and coaching for many years with leadership teams and felt that there is more support that is needed to give a better experience and performance process to those new in management roles. Having worked with many large and medium Retail organizations she seen the impact of new Managers needing training to cope better when dealing with people management and building effective teams.
Louise works with leadership teams that need support in creating training in performance management, coaching and team conflict. Most of the training programs are custom built and designed for each organization. Louise has worked with a vast range of companies from Retail, Pharmaceutical, Banking to hospitality.
Siobhán Morrissey
University Researcher & Lecturer
Dr Siobhán Morrissey is a lecturer and researcher in children’s literature at the University of Galway. She completed her PhD in 2022 on the children’s author Enid Blyton and is currently writing her first monograph titled Empire and Race in Enid Blyton’s Fiction: Deconstructing Whiteness and Modern Editing Practices, which will be published with Bloomsbury in 2025.
Siobhán is the current vice-president of the Irish Society for the Study of Children’s Literature.
Mei-Ling McNamara
Investigative Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker
Mei-Ling McNamara is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker with an extensive background in short and long-form storytelling. She has worked as a reporter, producer and director for international media outlets including the Guardian, Al Jazeera English, CNN International Channel 4 and the BBC. Her print and multimedia pieces have also featured in the Guardian Long Read, New York Times, the Observer Magazine and Observer on Sunday among others. Her industry work has included narrative journalism, print/radio features, live news production, foreign/current affairs productions, multimedia investigative projects and long-form documentaries. Working in both print and broadcast media, her in-depth investigations often focus on human rights, corporate malfeasance, environmental crimes and criminal justice issues.
Her investigative journalism work for the Guardian and Al-Jazeera English has received several awards for her in-depth coverage of underreported issues on modern-day slavery and exploitation. Her documentary “Children of the Cannabis Trade” for Al Jazeera's People and Power strand made public for the first time the criminalisation of child trafficking victims within the British justice system, while her written feature “A Slave in Scotland” for Guardian Weekend Magazine received numerous awards for exposing the legal and psychological realities migrant labour trafficking victims face in the UK. She recently reported, produced and directed The Trap, a year-long Guardian investigation about the targeting of incarcerated women out of US prisons and jails for the sex industry, which has impacted how US Homeland Security is training their anti-trafficking investigators. To date, The Trap has received the highest views of any Guardian documentary in its history, amassing over 29 million views and has been selected as among the top 200 pieces of journalism in the paper’s last 200 years in print. Most recently she published a two-year investigation, How Facebook and Meta Became Marketplaces for Child Sex Trafficking in the Guardian (April 2023), influencing the New Mexico Attorney General to launch a lawsuit against the social media giant.
She is a current 2024 grantee of JournalismFund Europe, working with other journalists on a cross-border investigation between Ireland, France and Germany.
Brothers in Arms
DJs
This is a collaboration between two brothers Killian and Mitch Mac Donald from the gateway of Connemara to celebrate all that is Connemara. The flora, fauna, the music and magic. Crystal-clear waters, and the green and turf-coloured lands, are the perfect combination for visual art. A press play, poetic partnership.
With over 30 years of Dj and event experience between them, the Brothers in Arms show passion for house music and disco lights in Galway's nightlife scene still to this day, creating unforgettable experiences with every performance for over two decades, now they take on a new adventure.
The sights and sounds of a place like no other, this is the Connemara Collection.
Louise McCormack
PhD Researcher in Trustworthy AI & AI Ethics Evaluation
Combining over a decade of industry experience with academic research, Louise is at the forefront of advancing ethical standards in artificial intelligence. Currently pursuing a PhD at the ADAPT Centre, University of Galway, Louise focuses on evaluating and quantifying the trustworthiness of AI systems in line with international industry standards like ISO and NIST, and ethical frameworks such as the EU Principles of Trustworthy AI which are detailed in the European Union's AI Act and
Louise is developing a tool that measures AI systems' adherence to ethical principles such as fairness, transparency, accountability, and human oversight. By quantifying and visualising these trade-offs, she addresses the urgent need to assess AI's impacts on society, in particular in high-risk areas like judicial sentencing and financial services, where biassed AI decisions can perpetuate systemic injustices, and limit access to essential services and affect our fundamental rights.
Drawing from extensive experience in digital innovation and transformation projects including implementing advanced NLP chatbots in regulated industries as early as 2018, Louise bridges the gap between theoretical ethics and practical implementation. She is deeply committed to shaping a future where AI technologies are not only powerful but also align with human values, ensuring they serve society in a way that is safe and ethical.