Laidlaw Foundation

🍎 Big news from the Laidlaw Schools Trust The launch of its new Apple Regional Training Centre (RTC) marks an exciting step forward for education innovation across the North East - bringing together educators, industry partners and innovators to rethink what learning can look like for young people. 🚀 The RTC is designed to create meaningful collaboration between schools, share best practice, and open real pathways and opportunities for students across the region. From future-focused events and practical support to a growing network of changemakers in education, this is about building something bigger together. For Scholars and young leaders passionate about education, innovation and community impact, this is an exciting space to watch.✨ Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/eF87t5aF #ExtraordinaryEducation #AppleRegionalTrainingCentre #RTC #AppleRTC #EducationInnovation #FutureOfEducation #Leadership #CommunityImpact 

💡 Leadership Quote of the Week: #Rosalía 💡 The Catalan singer Rosalía, who trained in flamenco and broke through internationally with El Mal Querer in 2018, is currently halfway through her first arena tour, performing in venues from Madison Square Garden to the O2 arena. The album she is touring, LUX, released last November, was named the best-reviewed record of 2025. By every external measure available to a musician at this stage of a career, she is at the point where the world is most willing to tell her she has succeeded. Asked recently what success means to her, she located it somewhere else entirely: in alignment between what one thinks, feels, and does, and in the willingness to live according to the person one knows oneself to be. This week, we explore the album she made on that principle, the women whose lives shaped it, and what her version of ambition might offer your own. 🔗 Read the full post here: https://lnkd.in/ezASHnmE #LeadershipQuoteOfTheWeek #LaidlawScholars #LaidlawValues #Ambitious #Transcendence

🌟 Scholar Spotlight: Andrew Edginton 🌟 Earlier this week, we marked Sir David Attenborough's 100th birthday and reflected on a career spent showing us the natural world, and the discipline required to tell hard truths about a changing planet. It reminded us of a Scholar Spotlight worth revisiting: a Laidlaw Scholar whose research reads the history of that change from thousands of years deep in polar ice. Andrew Edginton, a #LaidlawScholar at the University of St Andrews, worked with ice cores from Greenland to improve how we date historically unidentified volcanic eruptions, events that have driven the largest natural shifts in climate over the past millennium yet remain largely unaccounted for in modern climate models. His work refined the computational tools behind these calculations, laying the groundwork for more accurate and accessible future research. Like Attenborough, Andrew's curiosity about the natural world grew into something larger. A childhood spent watching rare migratory birds near the Kent coast led first to geology and volcanology at St Andrews, then to Tanzania, where his Leadership in Action placement with Attraction Birds Conservation saw him help secure a lasting partnership between the NGO and a local safari company, giving the organisation and its students long-term financial stability. 🔗 Read more about Andrew's research and journey on the Laidlaw Scholars Network: https://lnkd.in/ecyiGu_U #Research #ClimateScience #Volcanology #Conservation #LaidlawScholars #Leadership #DavidAttenborough

💡 Leadership Quote of the Week: #DavidAttenborough 💡 Sir David Attenborough turned 100 last Friday, and remains one of the most listened-to voices in the world on the future of the planet he has spent his life filming. He studied zoology at University of Cambridge, joined the BBC in 1952, and has spent the seventy years since introducing several generations of viewers to a natural world few of them would otherwise have seen. In the last quarter of that career, the work has changed. The presenter once known for the beauty of what he showed has, increasingly, had to speak about its decline. In an interview for BAFTA Media Technology Limited, Attenborough described the discipline that shift has required of him: a balance between speaking with care and refusing to leave the most urgent truths unspoken. 🔗 Read the full post on the Laidlaw Scholars Network and explore what Attenborough's challenge asks of you: https://lnkd.in/e3xcbVtj #LeadershipQuoteOfTheWeek #LaidlawScholars #LaidlawValues #Brave #Integrity Photo credit: BBC/Passion Planet/Joe Loncraine

💡 Leadership Quote of the Week: #SabastianSawe 💡 Last week, Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon in one hour, fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds, becoming the first person in history to break two hours in an official marathon. For years, the sub-two-hour marathon had been considered beyond the limits of what the human body could sustain. Sawe had spent three previous marathons finishing within seconds of the mark, training and racing on the belief that the limit sat elsewhere. Asked afterwards what he hoped people would take from his run, his answer was not about the record itself but about what it might say to the next generation: that nothing is impossible, and that everything becomes possible when you carry the spirit to keep going. 🔗 Read the full post on the Laidlaw Scholars Network and explore what Sawe's challenge asks of you: https://lnkd.in/eVzDNvZD #LeadershipQuoteOfTheWeek #LaidlawScholars #LaidlawValues #Ambitious #Courage

💡 Leadership Quote of the Week: #MerylStreep 💡 This week, as The Devil Wears Prada 2 arrives in cinemas, Meryl Streep returns at 76 to a role she first played two decades ago. It is a fitting moment to revisit a much older piece of advice she once gave, long before the recognition that now surrounds her. In her 1983 commencement address at Vassar College, Streep described what she called the choice between the devil and the dream. A dilemma, she warned, that would arrive every day in different little disguises.  Her counsel to the graduating class was a call to live and work with integrity, refusing to let complacency erode the truths they knew deep down. Forty years on, her words have lost none of their weight. Read the full post on the Laidlaw Scholars Network and explore what Streep's challenge asks of you. 🔗 Discover what taking your heart to work really means: https://lnkd.in/emMMcnbA #LeadershipQuoteOfTheWeek #LaidlawScholars #LaidlawValues #Ambitious #Integrity

🌟 This week, programme managers from across our global community came together in Dublin for the 2026 Programme Management Meeting, hosted at Trinity College Dublin's Trinity Innovation Hub. Three days of colleagues learning from one another, exchanging ideas across institutions, and thinking collectively about the future of the programme, all under this year's theme: Elevating Ambition: Shaping the Future of Scholarship.   📅 Tuesday | Strategic Goals and Priorities 🎤 Our CEO Susanna Kempe opened with a call to embrace purpose and pace, followed by Programme Director Amy Moore on the year ahead: scholar-championed LiA organisations, our Taylor & Francis Group partnership, and the global alumni strategy.   💼 Marketing Manager Hannah Watton showed how Scholar profiles on the Laidlaw Scholars Network can drive real visibility and opportunity. Christopher Cullen, Amanda Andersson and Samuel A. (UCL) then shared how they're building a scholar community that thrives across cohorts and beyond the programme.   🏛️ The day wrapped with Trinity College Dublin's Provost Professor Linda Doyle in conversation, a walk through the Book of Kells together, and dinner at Fallon & Byrne over a keynote from Maria Balinska, with plenty of time to connect along the way.   📅 Wednesday | Knowledge Sharing and Innovation 🔍 Farhana Goha (New York University Abu Dhabi), Kate Ivanchenko (Trinity College Dublin) and Rebecca Shaw (University of Leeds) compared notes on what makes recruitment and selection work, and Ariella Lang (Columbia University) and Dan-Thi Nguyen (EPFL) shared how they guide scholars from LiA proposal to impact.   📚 Stephanie Malak, PhD (Barnard College) and Shraddha Prasad (University of Toronto) pulled back the curtain on the work behind their scholars' Taylor & Francis F1000 shortlistings, while Lucy Ballard (Duke University) and Celina O'Connor (University of St Andrews) closed the morning on how inter-university partnership unlocks research opportunity and student mobility.   💭 The afternoon handed the floor to the room itself with Collective Ambition, participant-led working groups where colleagues tackled the shared challenges of building a stronger global network together. Our Scholars Advisory Board members Samuel A., Krithik Ashokkumar, Tyler Carriaga, Lizzie Hall, Bhadra Panicker, Maria R., Amber Wong and Anjelica Young brought their invaluable perspective throughout.   A heartfelt thank you to Darren Jones, Orla Bannon, Kate Ivanchenko and Emma Mooney at Trinity College Dublin for all their work behind the scenes in making this week happen, and to every programme manager, advisory board member and colleague who brought their insight throughout. 💙

👋 Laidlaw Alumni in Cambridge - join us this Friday for a relaxed social! Hosted by Leonardo Vilardo, this is a great opportunity to meet fellow Laidlaw alumni and reconnect with old friends. Whether you are currently a postgraduate student or have recently completed the #LaidlawScholars programme, come along for a casual evening of good conversation and great company. If you are based in Cambridge (or nearby), we would love to see you there. 🎟️ Register here: https://luma.com/g7cu04f8

💡 Leadership Quote of the Week: Victor Glover 💡 Last week, Victor Glover returned to Earth having piloted NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Artemis II mission around the Moon and back, completing the first crewed lunar flyby in more than half a century and setting a new record for the farthest human spaceflight in history. Navy aviator, test pilot, ISS crew member, and now the first person of colour on a lunar mission. Each step of his career has taken him somewhere he had never been before, and in doing so, he has helped expand who gets to be seen in spaces like these. 🔗 What can emerging leaders learn from his words? Read more: https://lnkd.in/gNMpnVTi #LeadershipQuoteOfTheWeek #LaidlawScholars #LaidlawValues #Brave #Courage #Artemis #NASA #SpaceExploration

🚀 Laidlaw alumnus Thomas Mason is giving a talk on turning “no” into something more Thomas studied electronic engineering with business management at the University of York, where his Laidlaw research explored how AI can enhance rather than replace human decision-making in organisations. For his Leadership in Action, he worked with the Timothy Smith Network to widen access to opportunity for young people, and today he's the founder and director of HYEN, helping young learners get creative with STEM! Now he's sharing his own story: how the people who said "no" shaped his path as an entrepreneur, and why believing in young people before they believe in themselves matters. 👇 Read Thomas's full story and book your spot #LaidlawAlumni #Entrepreneurship #STEM #LaidlawScholars