About
I am an analyst and data scientist. I have spent most of my career doing tech-type work in non-profit think-tanks on energy and climate change, with a side of policy and campaigning.
I co-founded Future Energy Associates with three friends from UCL. We use data science to solve energy sector problems and have worked on a wide range of interesting problems in our first year, including helping a major wind developer optimise site layouts.
I co-founded a company with Alex Remedios on the Entrepreneur First accelerator programme. We had a go at improving software tools for more reliable, reproducible data science - particularly around the Jupyter project - Alex is taking the open source project forward as nbmake.
Previously, I worked at Carbon Tracker for two years 2017-2019 as a data scientist focusing on stranded asset risk in the power sector, particularly coal-fired power stations, and helped Matt Gray start a project using satellite imagery to monitor power stations in near-real time. Our report was highly commended at the Business Green awards and got some nice writeups, e.g. QZ. This really got going after my time though, morphing into a Google AI grant supported project that in turn led to Climate TRACE - huge props to everyone involved. The dream of real-time MRV is coming closer.
Previously I worked in Westminster as a climate and energy policy researcher for Barry Gardiner MP in his role as Shadow Minister for Energy and Climate Change and as senior parliamentary assistant for Gill Furniss MP in her role as Shadow Minister for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Before that I was head of technology at Sandbag (now Ember), an NGO focused on carbon markets.
I’ve also worked at the Alvin Weinberg Foundation, a charity advocating the development of next-generation nuclear technology and worked as an intern with Lord Alf Dubs and at the British Embassy, Prague.
I have an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Cambridge and a Masters degree in Energy Systems and Data Analytics from UCL.
Laurence WatsonThis blog is made with Hugo and the theme is adapted from Hugo-Notepadium