Meet The Team

Raoul holds a PhD in Computer Science from Cambridge University and was nominated an Oracle Java Champion for his contributions to the community.

He is an international speaker and best-selling book author. He has advised and worked for several organisations on large-scale software engineering projects including at Google, Oracle, eBay and Goldman Sachs.

Kevin has led the development of data products for the energy sector and worked for the telecommunications industry at Qualcomm. He was also a visiting researcher at Stanford University.

Kevin has delivered data science and machine learning training courses to various clients from industries that include finance, engineering and research helping professionals leverage the latest techniques.

After receiving her degree in Engineering and Management Studies from Cambridge, Angela trained as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG. Post-qualification, she spent 10 years at Arm, a UK technology company, supporting its growth from a start-up into a FTSE-100 company, before taking a career break in 2003.

Since then, she has worked as a consultant helping technology start-ups build their financial infrastructure and operations. Her most recent client was the award-winning social enterprise Simprints Technology.

Anthony has led and developed commercial teams, delivering growth and organisational change for corporate and startup businesses.

After completing a degree in Biotechnology and Strategic Management at the University of Edinburgh, Anthony managed operations, sales and marketing functionalities within the Food Retail and Agritech industries. He is a passionate leader, enjoying coaching others to help them reach their potential.

Judit has 13 years’ experience as PA and Executive Assistant.

Before joining Cambridge Spark she worked for organisations like the University of Cambridge, Cambridge City Council and Cambridgeshire County Council as a Senior PA / EA.

With a BSc in Economics and many different PA and Secretarial qualifications.

Zaneta joined Cambridge Spark in early 2019. After finishing her studies and obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Accounting and Taxes, she gained experience in customer service, administration, finance and marketing within several educational organisations.

She loves everything that involves travelling and exploring.

Elisa holds a degree in International Business and Management from the Edinburgh Napier University and since graduation, she has worked in customer-facing roles for industry leaders such as Darktrace and Spotify.

After joining Cambridge Spark in early 2019 as the very first Account Executive, Elisa is helping the company grow by creating great experiences for current and future students.

Kieran has worked for over a decade in tech-enabled financial innovation; developing regulatory and FinTech data products, leading the creation of a FinTech education programme for regulators from 150+ central banks in 100+ countries at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Alternative Finance, supporting businesses in raising £25m+ via equity crowdfunding and co-authoring 30+ reports on the global FinTech industry. Kieran holds degrees from the LSE and Imperial College London.

Having studied both a degree (BA Hons Enterprise & Management at the University of the West of Scotland) and undertaken an administration apprenticeship, Darren has subsequently spent over a decade working for start-ups and national apprenticeship providers. With experience building teams and processes from scratch, working in established settings and a successful audit track record, Darren's remit at Cambridge Spark extends across apprenticeship compliance, audit and operations, supporting our drive to deliver a gold standard learning experience.

Miran has a background of working with Data for over 20 years. Primarily as a TSQL/SQL programmer and Database developer in leading organisations across number of different industries including Automotive ,GIS systems , Legal and Finance. In the past two years he has entered the training industry within the Apprenticeship sector at one of the largest providers, supporting and mentoring Level 4 data analysts through the BCS programme.

Here he will be the Technical mentor for apprentices working with them to develop their projects and managing them through the End Point Assessment for their apprenticeship.

Kayte has spent her most recent years working in Further Education, primarily focused on compliance and delivery of Apprenticeships across a broad range of subject sectors.

Kayte is driven and motivated by improvement and has successfully implemented processes and models in alignment with ESFA and OFSTED guidance. Kayte remains committed to quality improvement within training and education which supports the vision of Cambridge Spark.

Helen has a degree in Psychology and has worked within training and development for the last 8 years, helping clients choose the best solutions for their team. She has worked with organisations at a global scale, across a wide range of sectors including Pharma, Finance and FMCG.

Jaspar begun his career in sales and marketing many years ago! Since then he has specialised in professional and executive development and has designed & delivered programmes for over 35 companies in 8 different countries. Jaspar is responsible for ensuring that our partners development needs are understood and that high quality, results orientated solutions are created with our partners.

Tom heads up business development at Cambridge Spark, looking after market strategy. He works closely with our network of partners,  building relationships to bring our upskilling and development programmes to even more workforces. He originally trained as an accountant and tax advisor, before moving into business development and client relationship roles. 

Christina has years of experience in Marketing and holds a degree in Business and Human Resource Management. Hailing from Canada, but now based in Cambridge she has experience in business development, digital marketing and graduate recruitment.

As Account Executive, she will focus on the careers and talent side of the business helping to bridge the gap between our students and business partners.

Zoe is passionate about working with those at the leading edge of business and technology and has coached and mentored individuals from a wide range of backgrounds, including teams at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School.

Zoe has a science background and advanced coaching qualification. She has worked in the education sector for over 8 years, primarily for the University of Cambridge and Cambridge Assessment working in Education Services, Teaching and Learning and Student Support Services.

Ellen is passionate about empowering others to achieve their potential. Since qualifying in 2014 Ellen has coached a broad spectrum of clients within education settings, helping them progress towards their goals. Ellen is experienced in working with business leaders to develop mentoring and career progression programmes. Ellen also brings with her a degree in Social Policy, an IAG qualification, experience as a careers advisor, training facilitator and team manager within the charity and voluntary sector.

Robyn is a further education professional with over 10 years’ extensive experience in Operational Leadership, Delivery, Governing Compliance and Quality. She has a wealth of experience in supporting organisations to achieve growth whilst ensuring that quality practices are upheld.

As Head of Delivery, Robyn supports the Cambridge Spark Delivery Team and wider members of the team to develop and deliver impactful training and education experiences. Robyn is a qualified APM PMQ Project Manager with a Higher Diploma in Leadership and Management.

Jason joined the team in 2021. He has spent the last 3 years of his career working in the learning and development industry. Supporting organisations to develop digital and data capability to aid in in digital transformation initiatives in client facing account management roles.

Annica joined the Cambridge Spark team because she is passionate about the education sector and encouraging people to achieve their full potential. Having initially started her career at Cambridge University, Annica then spent 5 years working as an EFL teacher in Japan, and within the start-up sector in Sweden / Germany, before transitioning into coaching. Annica holds a BA Hons in English Language and Linguistics from University of York and is happy to guide learners through their English functional skills assessment.

Robbie is passionate about supporting others to progress and meet their full potential. He began his career in Youth Offending Services, going on to working within the Education Sector where he built effective working relationship across various stakeholders. This included maintaining business relationships and the delivery of training to companies such as Blackstone and State Street Bank staff to support the facilitation of their mentoring programmes. Robbie has been a qualified Coach and Mentor since 2013.

Samantha has 10 years experience working within the tech industry primarily responsible for office management, health & safety, payroll, travel and all things HR. In her previous role as Office/HR Manager for a tech start up she played a vital role in building the business from the ground up. This included project managing a purpose built facility from start to finish but also implementing all the systems, policies and procedures to support the organisation's aggressive growth plans.

Samantha is an Associate member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development.

Lucy is an experienced maths teacher and prior to this worked as a chartered accountant, spending several years of her career abroad in Switzerland. In these roles she most enjoyed interacting with people and helping others to overcome challenges in their work, learning and wellbeing. She joins Cambridge Spark as a coach.

Lucy has a BSc (Hons) in Mathematical Sciences and a PGCE from Durham University. She is happy to use her experience in teaching to provide maths support to learners.

Coming from a background of Energy Data Analytics, Raj joined the company in 2018, and is developing the K.A.T.E application. They transitioned careers from an Economics field to Computer Science. Often talks about their dog.

Samson has a background in Physics and holds an MPhys from Durham University. After graduating he worked in an analytics role before moving into software development, building client-facing web dashboards for or a research consultancy in the sports, media and sponsorship space. He joined the team in May 2020 and is working on the KATE platform in a full stack role.

Caroline joined the team in September 2018. Having studied Publishing, Web Development and Interactive Media in Cape Town, South Africa, Caroline has a background in graphic design and front-end web development, with a passion for UI and UX design. She now works on improving K.A.T.E. Always finding new ways to make the user’s journey as effortless as possible.

Ed joined the team in February 2020, having completed his PhD in Machine Learning at the University of Edinburgh. He previously worked with us as a teaching fellow, but now contributes to our R&D as well as our commercial activities. His research focuses on behavioural profiling of students and building models to deliver interpretable insight for course instructors.

Sahan Bulathwela is a PhD in Machine Learning at UCL. Before that, he worked as a Data Science Engineer at Skimlinks, where his primary focus was on building high-performance data pipelines for data processing and machine learning.

He holds an MSc in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning from UCL. For his master’s thesis, he worked with a Research and Advanced Development team at Cisco Systems to adapt machine learning algorithms to Cybersecurity.

Helen is completing a PhD in Statistics at UCL and The Alan Turing Institute. She holds a BA in Mathematics from University of California, Berkeley and a masters in Statistics and Data Science from the University of Edinburgh.

Eugenia is a Data Scientist working for Deutsche Boerse Group. Her main focus is on bringing machine learning solutions to the financial industry. She uses AI and NLP techniques to develop new products and improve internal processes.

Her goal is to deliver end-to-end data science solutions from data acquisition to model building to deployment & operation. Since 2009 Eugenia worked for a broad spectrum of organizations ranging from large corporations such as Deutsche Bank to fin-tech start-ups to academic institutions. A committed professional with hands-on experience in machine learning, web development and data visualisation for the financial services and healthcare sectors. Elena is innovative and confident with a can-do attitude and outstanding communication skills.

Ryan is a PhD Researcher in Machine Learning and Physics at the University of Cambridge. Prior to this, he was a Machine Learning Engineer at Prowler.io where he worked on Bayesian Optimisation and Bayesian nonparametrics. He also holds an MPhil in Machine Learning and Machine Intelligence. Outside of the ML sphere, Ryan is a Fide Master in chess, a keen runner, and has recently taken up Latin dance.

Chris is a machine learning engineer working in computer vision at Calipsa. His interests are in Bayesian neural networks, reinforcement learning, variational inference and computer vision. Prior to this, he completed his MPhil in machine learning at the University of Cambridge. Chris also enjoys planting and working closely with artists on their ML projects.

Ashwin D. D’Cruz is a Machine Learning Engineer at Calipsa. He holds an MPhil in Machine Learning, Speech and Language Technology from the University of Cambridge.

Maria is a Research Fellow at the AI Centre at UCL. Prior to that she was Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, a Lecturer at University Loyola Andalucia and a Research Assistant at the Spanish National Research Council and the University of Cordoba. She holds a PhD in machine learning, a MSc on intelligent Systems and a BSc on Computer Science. Maria is especially interested in the application of artificial intelligence for sustainable development.

Jorge is a PhD candidate at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, where he uses tools and concepts from machine learning to understand how humans and animals learn.

Leigh is currently completing a PhD at Imperial College London in Statistics focussing on applications of time series analysis to network monitoring, predominantly for cyber security. Previously she completed her Masters in Mathematics also at Imperial.

Ekaterina is a senior research associate at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory, working on Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA). She conducted her PhD at the Natural Language and Information Processing Group, Computer Laboratory. Her research focuses on compositional distributional semantics and the use of machine learning methods in educational NLP.

Ricardo is a Post Doctoral Research Associate at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL. He obtained his PhD from Imperial College London, during which time he also interned as a data scientist at Spotify.

David is a lead technologist working for Financial Services Fraud Prevention Technology division. His main focus is delivering end-to-end analytics and AI solutions from model building to deployment, operating on a high-throughput real-time fraud prevention platform.

Previously he managed to bootstrap the department’s big data platform built on Apache Hadoop and Spark and was working as a technical architect on many projects on the areas of Trade Surveillance, Anti-Money Laundering and Regulatory Reporting. He likes reading, listening to weird music and learning about the next random thing he gets excited about.

Marc received a PhD with honours in Wireless Communications and Information Theory from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), where he obtained his MSc. Since 2015, he has worked as a Data Scientist for Zhilabs in Barcelona, providing in-depth data analytics to telco providers; Darktrace in Cambridge, UK, providing ML-based cybersecurity services; Eigen Technologies in London, providing ML and NLP based products and services, focused on extracting unstructured information from legal and financial documents; and Streetbees in London, providing market research and insights into communities by leveraging ML and NLP concepts.

Alan is currently undertaking a DPhil in Statistics and Machine Learning at the University of Oxford. He has a strong research interest in Statistical networks, Kernel methods, preferential learning and Graphical Neural Network. His current project is on combining insights from nonparametric modelling based on reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) with spectral methods for ranking, in order to integrate contextual information with the pairwise comparisons, facilitating the extraction of latent structures behind preferential data.

Alan is also keen on bridging the gap between advanced Artificial Intelligence research and the business world. From his experiences as an ML consultant and the former Managing Director of a student-run AI consulting group, he has developed a strong skill set on mathematical modelling, project scoping, team management and designing functional teams for projects.

Alex is currently finishing his PhD at The Alan Turing Institute/University of Edinburgh. His interests include time series, graphical models, Bayesian methods, deep learning and meta-learning. Small data problems perhaps interest me more than big data problems, and grey box problems more than black box. Alex holds an MSc in Machine Learning and Computational Statistics from University College London.

Julian-Ferdinand is a data scientist at Security Research Labs, a Berlin-based cybersecurity consultancy, where he optimises cybersecurity strategies for companies around the world. Prior to this, he completed his MSc in Computer Science at UCL with a focus on ML and software engineering. Throughout his undergraduate in Germany, China, and the US, he specialised in social computational science and gained first-hand experience in data analytics at McKinsey and various tech start-ups. He is a scholar of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation.

Helena is an AI and machine learning research associate at the University of Cambridge, in the Department of Computer Science and Technology. She holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, an MPhil in Mathematical Networks. With background in theoretical physics and mathematics, her research combines complex systems, mathematical networks and deep learning. She is currently focusing on unsupervised generative models and graph neural networks. In her spare time she enjoys playing Ultimate Frisbee.