Meet us at DSEI 2025

Rory leads TWI’s industrial membership and commercial engagement activities across the energy, defence, and advanced manufacturing sectors. With a strong focus on building collaborative partnerships, he works closely with companies to align TWI’s technical expertise with their innovation, safety, and integrity challenges.

Rory is an accomplished business leader and strategist with over 30 years of industry experience in capital equipment in-service support and asset management. In the last 20 years, Rory has been at a senior level, holding directorial positions in operations and sales and as a managing director. During his career, Rory has worked with most of the major UK defence companies, gained awards for achieving operational excellence, and helped companies grow organically.

Vito Di Pietro is an engineer in the manufacturing industry, working on bridging the gap between market and research. He has a master degree in Electronic Engineering from the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy. He coordinated several international research projects on innovative technical solutions, and helped companies developing and implementing digital manufacturing processes.

Vito started working at TWI Ltd. in 2020 as Senior Project Leader, working on friction welding and electron beam welding and their implementation in production. Today, he works as Growth Manager, Space, in Business Development at TWI.

Dr Charlotte Blake is the Senior Defence Sector Manager for Aerospace clients at TWI as well as the Equipment, Consumables and Materials sector. With a technical background in Additive Manufacturing, Charlotte has worked across Powder Bed Fusion, Powder Directed Energy Deposition, and EHLA technologies. After leading management of the Manufacturing Metrology Team at the University of Nottingham and the Midlands Centre for Data-Driven Metrology, Charlotte returned to TWI in 2022 to join the Membership team and focus on ensuring maximum benefit for new and existing members of TWI in her sectors. Charlotte is passionate about STEM outreach and has contributed to many programs in the past, including Pint of Science, Soapbox Science and People Like Me. 

Dr Abbasi Gandhi has over 18 years of experience in the manufacturing and RTO based organizations. He worked and managed a wide variety of R&D projects in the following technical areas: bio-nano-technologies, powder metallurgy, heat treatment, thin films, materials processing, materials joining, materials characterisation, surface modification, functional coatings, materials sintering, energy harvesting and thermodynamics. He has been involved on large scale industrial and EU projects as research assistance and finished as Team manager prior to joining TWI in 2019. His main areas of involvement at TWI include diffusion bonding, microjoining (soldering, resistance welding, ultrasonic bonding etc.), powder metallurgy (sintering, processing etc.), functional coatings (bio coating, piezoelectric coatings etc.), surface modification as well as general heat treatments.

Harry Atherton has worked at TWI since 2016. He joined after completing his studies in Mechanical Engineering at the University of the West of England, where his studies also consisted of a 'Year in Industry,' during which he worked at TWI as an Industrial Placement Student. He is currently a Senior Project Leader in Non Destructive Testing (NDT).

Harry’s main role within the NDT team is to deliver research projects relating to various NDT techniques, including UT, PAUT and Radiography. He has led a number of projects relating to Digital Radiography, including the development and assembly of a fully functional X-ray system for the inspection of electronic MEMs wafers.

His areas of expertise also include Mechanical Design and Manufacture, where he has been responsible for the delivery of a wide range of prototypes and higher TRL components for NDT applications while at TWI.

Owen Rees-Lloyd is a senior project engineer at TWI with more than 5 years industrial experience in non-destructive testing (NDT).  Having joined TWI in 2016, Owen spent his first 3 years at TWI as a PhD student working on Electromagnetic Acoustic Transducers. Following his PhD, Owen joined TWI as a project engineer, leading and delivering a wide range of engineering and research projects within NDT. More recently, Owen has been working on robotic deployment of NDT inspections, with a particular focus on eddy current technologies, along with development of coded excitation ultrasonic systems, and the application of Total Focussing Method (TFM) technologies.