Biography

I was born on the Isle-of-Wight, off the south coast of England, in 1991, and grew up mainly there and in Oxfordshire, with a brief stint in Cumbria.

After studying Maths and Science at the state sixth-form The Henley College, in Henley-on-Thames, I went to the University of Oxford to study Biochemistry, which is where I met my wife. I wasn't especially thrilled by the course during the first three years, but in my 4th year (a Masters year) I joined the lab of Prof. Alison Woollard (who gave the RI Christmas lectures in 2013), where I actually started to enjoy Science. In Alison's lab I was introduced to the model organism C. elegans, which the lab was using to study stem cell-like divisions and aging.

A hermaphrodite adult C. elegans. The oval blobs inside are embryos of the next generation.

After graduating, my wife and I decided to move to London, and I was lucky enough to be offered a one-year contract working in the newly-established lab of Dr Nathan Goehring. The research is broadly to understand the fundamental mechanisms underlying how patterns form in organisms (e.g. stripes on zebras, segments on caterpillars etc). There are many examples of hidden patterns in organism, made up of molecules which you can't see with the naked eye. One such system is the PAR polarity network, made up of a bunch or proteins that can self-organise in to two distinct spatial groups, allowing cells to define distinct ends (e.g to enable cells to move in one direction).

A one-cell C.elegans embryo just at the start of polarisation, right before cell division, and after cell division. The red and cyan color is from two different fluorecently-tagged PAR proteins, showing how they separate and mark the ends of the cell.

I really enjoyed my year working in the lab, and applied to a PhD position starting the next year. During my PhD, the lab also moved to the newly-built Francis Crick Institute next to St Pancras International train station, London, which is a great building and well worth a visit. During my PhD I did a lot of microscopy, and was also introduced to computer programming by a friend and fellow PhD student.

The Francis Crick Institute ("The Crick").

The end of my PhD was a busy time, writing my thesis, moving to a new flat, becoming a dad, defending my thesis, and starting a new job, all in the space of a few months.

Me with my few-day-old daughter.

After leaving the Goehring lab, I joined the lab of Prof. Jonathan Chubb (University College London) as a post-doc, working on how cells make decisions during development. The lab mainly uses a "social" amoeba as a model. These cells are really quite special, being able to live alone as single-cells, happily eating bacteria, but also able to come together to form a multicellular organism when times get tough.

dictyostelium discoideum development. On the far left are cell living individually, feeding on a lawn of bacteria. From left to right, the cells aggregate and develop in to a multicellular structure, made up of hundreds of thousands of cells.

During my time in the lab I did more and more programming, and began to find this more interesting and enjoyable than the traditional lab work. I also realised that I wasn't really getting any better at programming, not having anyone to learn from, so decided to leave academia and see if I could find a job working with professional software developers. We'd also decided to move out of London to Cambridge, and I was very fortunate to start at a local software company on a one year training programme, mainly writing TypeScript. I was then promoted to s full time role, staying with the company for over three years.

I learned a great deal at CI, and couldn't have found a friendly place to start me dev career, but the time came when I wanted to branch out and learn new things. I was offered a job at Arm, which I have recently taken up in October of 2024, where I am working on tools to help developers work with Arm architectures.