Jesuan awarded CBE in New Year Honours
We are delighted to report that Laura Gilbert (1998, Natural Sciences) was awarded a CBE for services to technology and analysis in the New Year Honours List.
The New Year Honours List recognises those who have made achievements in public life or committed themselves to serving and helping Britain.
Dr Gilbert is the director of 10DS, the data science and analytics team in Downing Street, and joint Chief Analyst for the Cabinet Office. Her team provides fast-paced modelling and analysis to support policy making and delivery, and runs a broader radical transformation agenda promoting the better use of evidence, data and technology in government decision making. She is the Senior Responsible Officer for the AI for Public Good program in the Cabinet Office, spinning up a new team for automation and improvement of critical services (i.AI). She is also currently running a broader program of digital innovation in central government including rolling out close-to-free infrastructure for data sharing to speed up modernisation (Project rAPId). Her Evidence House program has built a network of 850 volunteers to deliver a combination of radial upskilling and home-grown AI solutions into public services, delivering nearly 15,000 hours of free technical training to civil servants last year.
Laura studied for her undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at Jesus College and has a doctorate in Particle Physics and GRID Computing from the University of Oxford. She held lectureships and a post-doctoral research position at Oxford and is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and of the Institute of Analytics. Laura spent three years as a quantitative analyst in the financial sector, working in modelling, analysis and artificial intelligence before joining a new medical technologies company as a director. She spent the next decade working as a hands-on CTO bringing the company from start up to SME to acquisition, and has significant experience in software development, wearable technology, systems architecture, data integration and system/data security. She is fluent in seven programming languages, and is named on four patents, including lead inventor on two data security patents.
As part of her medical technologies work Laura performed scientific consultancy completing diverse projects including creating an algorithm to detect heard beats via electromagnetic signals passing through clothing for medical evacuation; another algorithm to detect heart rhythm anomalies in close to real time through a patient's thumbs; providing analytic tools to biologists trying to disrupt the cell cycle of the malaria parasite; providing predictive algorithms based around measuring biomechanics and mental health measures to predict when a soldier in training was likely to become seriously injured in the near future, and predicting the behaviour of groups of snipers. She recently built the data collection and API for a pro-bono clinical trial in doxycycline based treatment for COVID-19.
