Executive Profile
Founder, CTO and Board Director who built and led one of the earliest cloud-native platforms used in approximately 1,000 clinical trials by over 150 pharmaceutical and biotechnology organisations worldwide.
Technology executive with over 25 years’ experience leading software engineering, cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, AI, and product strategy in highly regulated industries, scaling engineering organisations to more than 50 staff and the operation of globally deployed, high-availability SaaS platforms.
DPhil in Neural Networks and Explainable AI from the University of Oxford. Expertise spans AI, enterprise architecture, distributed systems, cloud platforms, data science, and regulated software. Inventor on two patents.
Following a successful founder and CTO career, I now focus on independent AI research and software development while undertaking selected board, advisory, and fractional CTO engagements.
Professional Experience
- Chose to step back from full-time executive leadership following the successful acquisition and integration of Cmed in order to pursue independent research and selective advisory work.
- Independent research in explainable AI, probabilistic modelling, complexity theory, and related fields.
- Exploring agentic AI techniques to accelerate software development without compromising robustness or quality.
- Developing open-source and personal software projects.
- Available for non-executive director/board advisory roles, and fractional CTO engagements.
- Joined on a part-time basis following the acquisition of Cmed to support technical integration, organisational restructuring, and executive transition.
- Reduced financial and regulatory exposure by negotiating orderly exits from major customer and supplier contracts.
- Advised executive leadership, providing continuity and stability during adjustments to the new operating model.
- Defined enterprise AI strategy and governance, establishing the foundations for responsible adoption in a highly regulated industry.
- Architected and led development of the regulated SaaS platform underpinning the business, used to collect, validate, and manage data from approximately 1,000 clinical trials, delivering regulatory-compliant datasets for over 150 pharmaceutical and biotechnology organisations.
- Primary data collection platform for the oncology division of a top-three global pharmaceutical company, the innovation group of another top-three pharmaceutical company, and a top-three Japanese pharmaceutical company for electronic source (eSource).
- Technical innovations included unified Electronic Data Capture (EDC) and eSource, built-in analytics (R, Python), actionable insights, and seamless offline operation (e.g. vaccine data in remote Africa).
- Architected and operated a geographically distributed private cloud of ~500 virtualised servers, later leading migration to AWS and Azure while reducing operating costs and allowing the company to focus on its core business.
- Delivered >99.99% service availability across more than 20 years of continuous global operation.
- Built around an immutable audit trail and a single source of truth, supporting FDA regulatory compliance. (patent US20040177090A1).
- Early adopter of Python across all server-side infrastructure and application development.
- Built and led multidisciplinary engineering, support operations, and Corporate IT exceeding 50 staff, enabling sustained global delivery of regulated SaaS platforms.
- Head of the SaaS Business Unit, responsible for sales, marketing, financial forecasts, P&L.
- Executive technology spokesperson for group customers, partners, investors, and internal stakeholders.
- Board Director responsible for long-term technology strategy and governance.
- Co-founded the company and led technology strategy, architecture and engineering.
- Designed innovative clinical trial system architecture (patent US20040025030A1).
- Played a leading role in securing venture capital and representing the company to investors.
- Following acquisition, ThirdPhase became Cmed Technology, a subsidiary of Cmed Group.
- Built a prototype e-commerce system with immutable audit trail and encryption, integrating peripheral hardware such as fingerprint readers, mobile phones, barcode scanners and printers, ECG, vital signs and spirometry medical devices.
- Delivered a fully functional prototype system within three months.
- Successfully secured venture funding through investor presentations.
- Co-founded ThirdPhase Ltd.
- Conducted research into machine learning, nonlinear dynamical systems, and Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for novelty detection and biomedical signal analysis.
- College Lecturer in Engineering Science.
Education
- Thesis: Explanation from Neural Networks.
- Algorithms to derive human-interpretable and quantifiably trustworthy explanations from general purpose probability estimators.
- CASE award from Rolls-Royce.
- First class (1st) Honours.
- Academic Scholar throughout.
- Faculty prize for multi-processor simulation of small mobile robot.
Outside Interests
Cello, violin, orchestral performance, chamber music, skiing, chess and mathematics.
Former committee member of Holbrook Sports and Leisure Club.
Former Chair of Horsham Symphony Orchestra, guiding it through several delicate transitions.