Donal is a Business Development Manager for the Creative Industries, based in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Donal provides project management and strategic support on industry engagement.

Background

Donal has a background in creative industies, including in games development where he worked in interactive and linear audio. Donal has also experience across a wide range of positions in community management and quality assurance.He has worked on a number of high profile projects including the Harry Potter and Sesame Street franchises, collaborating with writers, designers, artists, performers, musicians and software developers. 

An interest in innovation, entrepreneurship and start-ups led him to NI Screen, as the lead for the Interactive Sector. In this role he worked in the local interactive entertainment industry in the emerging field of Immersive Technologies, supporting IP development and securing in-coming productions. During his time with NI Screen, Donal helped diversify its portfolio from Film, TV and Animation into this globally relevant sector, which culminated in establishing the first dedicated games incubator, The Pixel Mill, and supporting Future Screens NI.

Find our more about Donal's career at LinkedIn.

Current roles and responsibilities

Donal's current role is Business Development Manager for the Creative Industries at Queen's. He provides project management capacity and strategic support on industry engagement while shaping key initiatives with timely and relevant industry input, guidance or insight.

Donal's role also involves identifying commercially relevant opportunities that deliver innovation, impact or potential spinout/spin-in opportunities, and expanding relationships with industry partners. He regularly engages with businesses, academics and government bodies, and is involved in consortium building and feeding back to relevant stakeholders.

Pre-pandemic Donal was often off campus, visiting businesses, attending networking events or participating in conferences to generate leads. The business development landscape has changed significantly over the last couple of years, with businesses being more open to connecting digitally and with the increase in online conferences. While this has enabled wider knowledge sharing, the spontaneity, random encounters and hands on time with key technology demonstrators has been sorely missed.

Donal has utilised his experience, knowledge and connections in game development and media industry to support this work and has been working on an approach that supports the utilization of the sciences in the arts and guide the arts through the sciences.

Contribution to specific research initiative or project

Donal is currently supporting Queen's MediaLab, which is a new facility and programme that is addressing commercial, research and skills requirements in areas of media software innovation, virtual production and the development of Real-Time 3D applications.

Donal played a critical role in developing the business case and commercial capacity for the Medialab, enabling the research community to take advantage of the opportunities emerging around these creative technologies and aligning to upcoming opportunities that will be afforded through the large-scale Belfast Region City Deal projects. Donal supported an extensive industry and stakeholder engagement with local and international industry partners, that involved identifying their research, skills and commercial needs and developing a robust approach to these emerging opportunities and market shifts, and he consulted with potential complimentary partner institutions and technology vendors that connects the Medialab to globally relevant centres of excellence. 

Recently Medialab hosted an Introduction to Unreal Engine & Real-time Compositing for mixed reality experiences, which was open to all staff and researchers with the aim of delivering a comprehensive project based introduction to Real-time 3D development. Over time, there are plans to develop a series of these initiatives that will empower researchers to take advantage of these techniques and technologies, develop a collaborative environment for the Real-Time 3D development and provide a knowledge sharing resource that can take researchers further than they could if they were on their own.