I actually began my academic journey studying Professional Musicianship at the Brighton Institute of Modern Music, where I developed a deep appreciation for creativity and discipline. However, after graduating, I realised that I needed to spend more of my life surrounded by books and thinking deeply about ideas. This realisation led me back to university to study Politics at the University of Glasgow, where I discovered my passion for understanding how political processes work and who holds power within different political regimes. My commitment to my studies was recognised through several awards, including the Adam Smith Prize for the most distinguished undergraduate in Social Sciences, the Alastair Reid Prize for best single Honours student with a First Class Degree in Politics, and the John Fowler Memorial Prize for best Politics Honours Dissertation.

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These achievements earned me a scholarship to pursue postgraduate studies at Oxford University, where I completed both an MSc in Politics Research and a DPhil in Politics with funding from the Economic and Social Research Council. It was at Oxford that I began one of my most significant contributions to political science: co-creating WhoGov with Jacob Nyrup, the world's largest publicly available dataset on cabinet ministers covering 177 countries from 1966–2021. This project, which continues to this day, won the American Political Science Association's Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Award for Best Dataset in 2021 and has enabled groundbreaking research on questions of gender representation, government accountability, and elite behaviour in democracies worldwide. I have since further explored WhoGov's capabilities at the London School of Economics and Royal Holloway, University of London through the New News Project.

 

Today, I teach at the London School of Economics', where I focus on political science, data science, machine learning, and computational methods for social scientists. My teaching has been recognised with the LSE Class Teacher's Award in 2026. I work at the intersection of political science and data science, developing innovative approaches to understanding how democracies function and who holds power within them. I am part of the GETGOV project (funded by the European Research Council), and have ambitions to make WhoGov a central dataset in political science (and the social sciences more broadly). My research has been published in the American Political Science Review, and I continue to explore questions about political elites, democratic governance, and comparative politics using both quantitative and (to a lesser extent) qualitative methods.