Current

Some recent clients and projects:

• Grantify: supported over 150 startups to develop their business plans and secure investment from Innovate UK, EIC Accelerator and SBIR.
• Association of Commonwealth Universities: supported their review of members’ digital capability and COVID response.
• LGfL: helped to run the Department for Education’s Edtech Demonstrator schools network, supporting over 4,000 schools in their transition to remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic.
• LGfL: helped to migrate and consolidate corporate web presence using Acquia Drupal and Site Studio platform to replace earlier sites and systems.
• UCL: coordinated ExCALIBUR Hardware & Enabling Software, the UK’s next generation supercomputing pathfinder programme.
• The Alan Turing Institute: supported their UKRI chartered review of the UK AI research community requirements for Digital Research Infrastructure.
• N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8CIR): supported hybrid delivery of the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Retreat via Airmeet.
• SUMS Consulting: supported digital innovation at universities.
• Jisc: supported their UKRI chartered review of Federation for Digital Research Infrastructure.
• STFC: supported their Exascale supercomputing requirements gathering.

• As a member of the DCMS College of Experts, synthesizing evidence and knowledge of research for policymakers.
• Focus areas including digital expertise and understanding of future technology; analysis of DCMS’ sector structures and characteristics; sector shock, transition and resilience.

• Evaluated hundreds of funding applications to Innovate UK to support decision making for hundreds of millions of pounds of public investment in businesses building products around emerging technologies such as augmented reality and artificial intelligence.
• Worked on a wide range of programmes including Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund Future Flight programme, which is investing £300m in building out the infrastructure for flying cars, electric aircraft and commercial drone delivery.

Previous Roles

• Led a team prototyping edtech interventions with universities and colleges around emerging technologies like Virtual and Augmented Reality.
• Conceived and led on Jisc’s Education 4.0 campaign on the opportunities and challenges of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies for teaching and learning.
• Personally invited to give evidence to Education Select Committee and DCMS Select Committee enquiries. Convened round tables of edtech practitioners contributing to the Department for Education’s Edtech Strategy development.
• Recognition as an edtech thought leader (interviews in the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Big Issue, Wired, Nature etc) and keynote speaker (BETT, ALT-C, Future Edtech etc).
• Widely published columnist in my own right e.g. in Education Technology, University Business, TES, Information Professional and Times Higher Education.

• Secured £1.4m of funding from EPSRC to set up a new high performance computing centre as a partnership between Loughborough University and the University of Leicester.
• Procured and commissioned a new £1m supercomputer, directed enabling mechanical and electrical works, recruited staff to operate the facility.
• Negotiated commercial contracts and information security arrangements with a wide range of clients including E.ON, Alstom and Rolls-Royce.

• Led on Loughborough’s project to implement cloud groupware. Deep student engagement leading to a “bake-off” between Google and Microsoft solutions and selection of Google Apps for Education (now GSuite).
• Led legal negotiations on what became the standard GSuite service agreement for EMEA customers, coordinated technical aspects of cloud migration and support for embedding Google technologies.
• Organised international GSuite user group conferences in 2011, 2012 and 2014.
• Headed up the University’s e-Learning systems team, leading a big push to VLE adoption (Moodle), e-Assessment (QuestionMark Perception) and lecture capture (Echo360).

• Led on a £2m project to replace the entire campus network infrastructure, upgrading in the process from a mixture of obsolete technologies (10Base2 Ethernet, ATM, FDDI) from different vendors to a single sourced Cisco Gigabit Ethernet solution which I also designed. This was a massive project as Loughborough’s campus is over 400 acres with 350+ buildings.

• Active in a number of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups during the Internet’s 1990s Cambrian Explosion, where I co-invented the “www.” standard for designating website domain names subsequently codified as Internet standard RFC2219/BCP17.
• Consulted on Internet technologies for companies as diverse as Cap Gemini, eBookers and British Gas.
• Worked as a Computer Science researcher on the UK electronic libraries programme (eLib), developing the ROADS subject gateway software for cataloguing Internet resources.

Volunteering and committee membership

• Times Higher Awards judge (2014-2019)
• Association for Learning Technology (ALT) conference programme committee (2012-2015)
• Elected to British Computer Society ELITE committee (Fellows and senior IT leaders group)
• Co-chair of UKRI Cloud for Research Working Group (2015-2019)
• Co-chair of UK National e-Infrastructure Project Directors Group (2014-2018)
• National Childbirth Trust (NCT) volunteer for Loughborough branch, helping to run Messy Play sessions for toddlers, Nearly New Sales and editing the branch newsletter

Honorifics

• Chartered Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS CITP)

Education

• Masters in Business Administration (MBA), Loughborough University
• Postgraduate Certificate in Management, Loughborough University
• Computer Studies (2.1 Hons BSc), Loughborough University