I believe that to be a well-rounded person you should have a healthy mix of work and service. You'll often find me doing projects or collaborations with non-profits, or doing some voluntary work.
Most recently, during the COVID years I helped the UK education sector respond to the needs of teachers and pupils by helping build an online learning platform, Oak National Academy for students to learn from home and in other settings when they're unable to attend school.
Our tiny tech and product team built and released the first version in a week, and scaled to support 4.5 million students per week to learn from home during the second wave of COVID. The wider team and partners produced almost a full national curriculum of video content and resources (~10,000 video lessons) across most subjects and made it all available for free (including finding a way to make it free to access on a phone) via the web.
It's since become a permanently-funded government department and has branched out into offering AI tools, and I'm consulting to help build some of them. Overall, Oak is my most remarkable "look what happened after those first lines of code" project!
Aside from Oak, I sit on the industrial advisory board of University of Birmingham School of Computer Science and I have a history of volunteering for tech-focused and social good organisations.
I've been a school governor at two schools, and was chair for three years at Heber Primary School in South London, where I learnt a lot about good governance.
I'm a Clore Fellow and am always interested in the intersection of modern technology and culture. The leadership fellowship I undertook exposed me to the needs of cultural and creative organisations and I've since been involved with several non-profits.
Through my running I have raised funds for autism charities including the National Autistic Society and Ambitious about Autism.
