Social and Community Involvement

We believe that the work we do, and our products, systems and tools, enable our customers to benefit and advance society. To ensure this continues, we are committed to helping young people at all stages of education to see the importance of choosing STEM subjects and the career opportunities this will offer them.

Over the course of the year, we organised a Girls in Tech session at our Asylum Research site for local middle school students, hosted work experience and undergraduate placement students and ran outreach sessions at local schools at all of our UK sites. We also organised on and off-site career development and professional skills workshops for students at our partner universities’ Centres for Doctoral Training. 

To promote wider public engagement in science, we participated in a number of activities, including partnering with two of the 21 exhibitors at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. We also worked with the University of Oxford’s History of Science Museum to support their People-Science-Business exhibit and two associated evening events to celebrate our 60th Anniversary.

At our Andor Technology site in Belfast, we arranged two open days for members of the local community to visit our facility to find out more about the work we do and how our systems and tools are used by our customers around the world.

In Japan, our support for the Millennium Science Forum continued to promote research in Condensed Matter Science and to increase the scientific exchange between Japan and Britain. 

We continue to encourage staff at all of our sites to support their local communities through charitable and other activities. At Andor Technology a team raised over £8,000 for the Belfast Children’s Cancer Unit Charity by organising cake sales, quizzes and pop-up shops. Colleagues at our Oxford site run a workplace lottery which has raised over £4,000 for Helen and Douglas House, a local hospice.

Elsewhere, colleagues collected bras for donation to women in Africa, arranged collection points for local charity shops, repeated our Christmas Shoe Box scheme for gift donations, and organised events throughout the year linked to national campaigns such as Red Nose Day and Save the Children’s Christmas Jumper Day.