Dr Steve Welch is one of the founding directors of KTN, where he is exec director of IDEAS – with primary responsibility for strategic relationships with Universities (including the KTP programme), emerging innovations, and ‘place’. Steve has extensive knowledge transfer experience, dating back to the earliest Faraday Partnerships and running through all of KTN history, up to the Electronics, Sensors, Photonics KTN of which he was CEO. Prior to this Steve had an extensive career designing, building and using scientific spacecraft instrumentation and was involved in international teaching and research in systems engineering. Steve is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and a member of the UK Space Agency’s Earth Observation Advisory Committee.