WISE Young Professionals Committee (WYPC): a round-up of 2025
2025 was a year of growth and impact for the WISE Young Professionals Committee (WYPC). From expanding the group to launching campaigns that tackle workplace challenges, the committee has continued to champion diversity and inclusion in STEM.
2025 was a transition year as we shifted to a new calendar cycle, the WISE Young Professionals continued to deliver impactful work despite the shorter year.
Here’s a round-up of their 2025 achievements:
New faces and leadership
We started the year with a recruitment drive as we welcomed five new members to the WISE Young Professionals Committee, taking the group to 13 for the first time.
Elish Chambers (GSK), Hannah Walker (Element), Kate Wheatley (Rolls-Royce), Lois Stahler (AstraZeneca) and Rachel Ziregbe (Convatec) officially joined the group in April in time for their first in-person meeting hosted by Committee-member Lily at BT’s campus in Ipswich.
Alongside five new members we also welcomed a new Chair, Lucy Davies and Vice Chair Nintse Dan-Thé to lead the WISE Young Professionals’ activities.
Bea and Fiona led the charge on growing the podcast, releasing 13 episodes in series 3, with features from 10 members of the WYPC.
They covered a huge range of topics from imposter syndrome and being the only woman in the room to why equity, diversity and inclusion still matters.
Their Spotify wrapped stats speak for themselves:
Campaign and social initiatives
Elisha led a very important campaign around harassment in the workplace. This included recording one of their most listened to episodes of STEM Unfiltered “We’re not getting paid enough for this”, creating a resource sharing real experiences and insight into how to better support those effected and launching a social media campaign across LinkedIn and Instagram.
Throughout the year Beth and Rachel have led the communications workstream creating plenty of content for socials role modelling the Young Professionals roles through “what’s my job” to share personal stories and insights into what they do and what STEM roles exist
More recently they’ve focused more on outreach and inspiring the next generation, with a fantastic social campaign called “Brilliant minds, curious questions” to answer STEM questions from year 7 students.
External engagement and events
The confidence gap is a topic that WYPC have put a lot of time into. Lucy and Gabbie spoke about it at a WISE webinar, Building a diverse workforce: the power of STEM outreach, in June this year and the group created a resource to support workplaces to tackle it.
Rachel also spoke at the same outreach webinar about how her organisation used My Skills My Life to enhance their outreach work.
Lois, Fiona and Hannah delivered an excellent breakout session at the 2025 WISE conference focusing on the confidence gap and how to support organisations to mitigate this in the workplace.
Lily and Lucy also spoke at the WISE Conference as part of a panel discussion with Dr Laura Norton and Mamta Singhal on how organisations can secure meaningful buy-in at all levels to advance women in STEM.
Lily shared her experience as a mentor and mentee at our recent Championing change: mentorship in action webinar. Recordings for WISE webinars are available to our members via the member dashboard.
Looking ahead to 2026, Elisha and Gabbie will be sharing insight into the confidence gap at the ASE Conference in January and Kate will be speaking at a joint WISE and UWE event on best practice for inclusive recruitment and retention for STEM apprenticeships on 27 January.
Thank you to Lily for hosting us at BT’s hub in Ipswich, Gabbie inviting us to AWE’s site in Reading and Elisha welcoming us to Capgemini’s new London office for all the in-person WYPC meetings this year.
If you’d like to know more about the WISE Young Professionals Committee and what they get up to, you can follow them on LinkedIn and Instagram and subscribe to their newsletter.