Meet the team

Barry brings deep experience in entrepreneurship, innovation and software commercialisation, alongside managing large-scale research and innovation portfolios within academia. Starting with a university technology spin-out, he has been involved in multi-million-dollar acquisitions, technology trade deals and management buy-outs, serving as a Director with responsibility for due diligence, finance and investor relations. He subsequently worked for a global software company before returning to academia, where he has played a key role in attracting over £100 million of investment to the region, including leading work to establish the National Innovation Centre for Data at Newcastle University.

Ashmita brings a unique combination of industrial R&D, skills and policy research to her new role as Director of Policy and Skills at NICD. A biomedical engineer turned social scientist, she began her career in product development designing patented products for billion-dollar brands at Procter & Gamble. Following this, she pursued her passion for education policy (particularly focused on understanding how to bring more women into STEM careers) through her Master’s and DPhil at the University of Oxford. She continues this link with the Oxford SKOPE Research Centre as an Honorary Research Fellow studying tertiary education systems and their role in regional skills development.  

Georgia manages all of our structures and processes, allowing successful delivery of the business plan. She also oversees contract and client relationship management, governance, HR and reporting. Georgia holds a degree in Biomedical Sciences and has a background in operations and recruitment. She's also a former ballroom dancing champion!

Angela manages the outreach programme for the National Innovation Centre for Data including conferences, and workshops, engaging with the public, industry, third sector, public sector and with regional and national partners. Angela's background is in economic development, managing large capital and revenue projects in both Higher Education, Industry and Public Sector settings.

She holds a PGCert in HE Administration, a First Class Degree in Leadership, Management & Organisation and CMI Diploma in Management. When not working she enjoys running at club level.

Jacek (yat-sek)'s background is in scalable computing, with broad experience in workflows, application deployment, recomputation and programming. His PhD focused on adaptive deployment of component-based applications in distributed systems. He combines his role at the National Innovation Centre for Data with academic research at Newcastle University.

Paul joined us from Newcastle University's School of Engineering, where he was a lecturer in Intelligent Transport Systems. Here, his work consists predominantly of general data analysis, geospatial data analysis, and data visualisation. When he's not at work, Paul spends his time looking after a small clowder of feral cats that adopted him several years ago.

Peter’s background is in computer and software engineering, having previously worked as an R&D software developer for a multinational IT company. His PhD focused on design, implementation, and automated computational placement of distributed streaming applications for real-time data analysis.

Antonia has an academic background that combines statistics and computer science, with a PhD that focused on scaling Bayesian modelling techniques. As a Data Scientist working at the National Innovation Centre for Data, her role is to help organisations discover and adopt new technologies, and develop the skills needed to address complex data science challenges. She works across diverse areas, including deep learning, natural language processing and data engineering. In her spare time, she enjoys a well-brewed coffee, a good book and walks in nature.

With a background in operations management Louise changed careers in 2020 when she gained her Data Science MSc from Newcastle University. She now works on variety of data science projects including, natural language processing, generative AI, data analytics and data science project scoping.  Louise is passionate about running and continues to recruit members to the Catalyst Run Club. 

Jordan joined us from Newcastle University's School of Computing and has a background in artificial intelligence strategies. His PhD resulted in a curated dataset for DNA technology, used in conjunction with machine learning and optimisation to inform better protocols and generate designs. When he isn't working, Jordan enjoys electric guitar, video games, and going to the gym.

With a background in Information Technology and Computer Engineering, Ramin has worked on interdisciplinary projects ranging from recommender systems in academic publishing to social data analysis for mental health research. He is mostly interested in applied NLP, LLM systems, and AI-assisted workflows in human-centred contexts. At NICD, Ramin helps businesses solve problems using these approaches. Outside work, he enjoys long walks outdoors.

Owen has a background in mathematics and statistics, having completed his PhD at STOR-i, Lancaster University. His PhD involved developing methods and theory around the topic of changepoints. Owen is really interested in applying statistics to improve people's lives and in a recent project, he developed a method utilising passive sensor data, to identify an individual’s routine behaviour. Flagging early changes to a person’s routine behaviours could help indicate early signs of health decline. In his spare time, Owen loves all things table tennis, both playing competitively and coaching others.

Joshua’s background is in medieval musicology and he has previously worked as a lecturer in music and digital humanities. His PhD focused on developing new methodologies for optical music recognition, corpus analysis, and deep learning for 13th-century vocal polyphony. He is also active as a professional performer of early music, with regular concert dates across the UK and 3 CD releases.