Kainos CTO Tom Gray appointed Director of Digital Catapult

Belfast, GB 23 June 2016 Tom Gray, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Kainos, the digital technology solutions provider, has today been appointed director of the new Digital Catapult centre in Northern Ireland. Digital Catapult is a not-for-profit research and development organisation which is looking to drive economic growth in the digital economy. It does this by building partnerships between data innovators, start-ups, scale-ups and data challenge owners to deliver new shared innovation and productivity. Tom is a 25-year technology industry veteran and is the driving force behind many of Kainos' most successful initiatives, including HealthHackEU and Kainos AppCamp. He has been the CTO at Kainos for over ten years and was recently appointed as Chairman of the Institution of Engineering and Technology in Northern Ireland. This is the Northern Ireland Digital Catapult's first year of operation. Tom will continue in his role at Kainos, and will be working for Digital Catapult on a secondment basis, splitting his time between both roles. The impact of Northern Ireland joining the UK Digital Catapult is to make it more of a connected region, and to encourage sharing data in a secure way. The Digital Catapult helps facilitate relationships and partnerships between startups, small and large businesses, academia, innovation clusters and the public sector. Commenting on his appointment, Tom Gray said, 'Launching the Digital Catapult in Northern Ireland will give technology businesses in Northern Ireland the opportunity to collaborate more closely with their counterparts across the rest of the United Kingdom. It will help local businesses work smarter, more efficiently, and ultimately become more productive and competitive. Being chosen to lead the initiative is hugely exciting.' The first Digital Catapult centre opened in London in November 2014 and there is now a network of centres in Sunderland, Brighton and Bradford. From running pilot projects through to larger scale initiatives, the Digital Catapult takes action to fix real problems and enables innovation to happen with impact. The Digital Catapult Centres provide communities with a space in which they can work, meet, showcase and collaborate to benefit their organisation and the wider UK economy.