Fiona is multi award-winning product design engineer and entrepreneur with a keen interest in the power of design to improve lives. She has designed products for NGOs such as Oxfam; for disaster relief, animal rescue, worked with Leckey to develop products to enhance the lives of kids with special needs, and Shnuggle to create lines of safe products for new parents. She is the Director of Heroshield Ltd; a not-for profit consortium of over 30 cross border companies developed to rapidly and locally produce PPE in response to the early stages of the Pandemic (awarded the ‘women in STEM and engineering’ WISE award by HRH Princess Margaret), launched her own product, Hug wearable heat pack to help women with period pain and runs design consultancy Nuli Design, based in Belfast.
More recently she has been working on development of regional entrepreneurship support design with MIT and has been piloting lots of new and updated programme and entrepreneurship support activity in Northern Ireland.
She now sits as the Director of Entrepreneurship and Scaling at Catalyst, to provide programmatic support and advice for new start-ups, innovators and entrepreneurs who wish to make their ideas a reality, working with a full spectrum of people from young people in schools and educators right through to scaling companies and corporate partners.