About my current job
I am a co-founder of BenevolentAI, a UK company which uses artificial intelligence (AI) applied to discovering medicines. We started the Company in 2013, and now have around 350 people in London, Cambridge, and NYC, and drug programmes (most advanced in the clinic being tested on patients) for diseases atopic dermatitis, ulcerative colitis, ALS, Parkinson's Disease and Glioblastoma. We have raised over $300m in financing and went public in 2022. In February 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, our technology identified a treatment for hospitalised COVID patients which is now approved in the US and several other countries and has been used to treat many thousands of patients (it was my first scientific publication for more than 15 years I think).
Fond memories of my time at EP
Playing for the "Real Pyschos" in the Mansfield Road five-a-side football tournament - as I recall we won in 2001 with victories over arch rivals in Anatomy and Physiology en route. Many happy memories of running TMS/ERP and some fMRI experiments on undergraduates, then bumping into them in bars/nightclubs later on.
Did you have a favourite tutor/lecturer/prof, and how did they inspire you?
Kia Nobre was (and am sure still is!) a wonderful supervisor and human being.
Do you have a lesson or advice that you'd give to current students/researchers at EP?
Things can work out in interesting and surprising ways. When I was in the Department the "neural nets" group was in its infancy and buried somewhere in the building. Who would have predicted the massive role of Artificial Intelligence in recent years? Or the fact that despite working on memory and attention for my DPhil (and not AI), then going off to a career in life science investment, I would end up co-founding an AI company, and the field of machine learning would embrace some of the concepts I was working on (in a completely different context) around 15 years later.
