Tom is Director of AI at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), scaling up AI, digital and data science to support national and local delivery.

Tom’s previous roles in government include MHCLG’s first Chief Data Officer, director of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Data Unit, founding director at the Joint Biosecurity Centre, and managing director at the Data Science Campus at the Office for National Statistics.

Before joining government, he was co-founder and chief executive of OCSI, a research and data 'spin-out' company from Oxford University. Tom has had board and advisory roles at the UN, Royal Society, Royal Statistics Society, Environment Agency, Open Data User Group, media and academic groups. 

Tom is visiting professor in AI at University of Sussex. He has a PhD in computational neuroscience, evolving neural networks for robot control (Sussex), an MSc in knowledge-based systems (Sussex), and MA in theoretical physics (Cambridge).