Sam leads the Housing and Manufacturing team at BE-ST, Scotland’s national innovation centre for the built environment. He brings over 25 years’ experience in construction offsite manufacturing, and innovation commercialisation focussed on standardisation, industrialised construction, and sustainable product development.

Sam has spent the last eight years focussed on driving the greater adoption of UK-grown timber in construction. Most recently, he led the manufacture of the UK Government's DfE GenZero project demonstrators, and was project lead for the £1.5m Innovate UK-funded Transforming Timber project, delivering the UK’s first two-storey homegrown mass timber home for COP26. Through this work, he established and leads the UK’s first and only full-scale mass timber manufacturing facility in Glasgow, Scotland.

Sam chairs the UK Government’s “Timber in Construction Roadmap 2025” Innovation Steering Group, the Scottish Forest & Wood-based Industries “Increasing the use of wood fibre in Construction” technical group and is a member of the Scottish Construction Leadership Forum’s “Modern Methods of Construction (MMC)” steering group. At this event he will be presenting with fire safety engineering colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, discussing recent work which explored where expert consensus exists around mass timber construction and, critically, where significant gaps in knowledge remain, on behalf of funding partner Built by Nature.