Tom is Director of the Deputy Prime Minister’s Data Unit and first Chief Data Officer at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The Data Unit provides critical data and insights to the department and ministers, to support data-driven decision making for national and local delivery.

Tom’s previous roles in government include founding director at the Joint Biosecurity Centre, and managing director at the Data Science Campus at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Before joining government, he was co-founder and chief executive of Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI), a research and data ‘spin-out’ company from Oxford University.  As well as working in public sector, industry and academia, 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).