I turn research into things people can use.
I founded Workerbird, a tech-for-good startup for workers, and took it from a hackathon win to three funded, delivered projects. Before that I spent eleven years running grant-funded human rights research. I am now bringing my tech and research background to the AI safety field.
Building tools for workers
Workerbird started life as the winning idea (called WageCheck) at a 2018 hackathon to help low-wage workers to tell whether they were being paid the legal minimum.
Over the next four years, Workerbird designed and built tools to help workers understand their working lives. I founded it alone and raised £125,000 across four competitive awards.
Career Mapper
460 union members piloted it; 71% came away feeling confident or empowered. Funder: Nesta CareerTech Challenge.
Case study →
Gig Economy Challenge
Riders across five platforms in five weeks. Funder: Mayor’s Resilience Fund.
Case study →
The Workerbird app
Reflective tracking, piloted with parents working through the first lockdown. Funder: The Social Tech Trust.
Case study →
Personal projects
Brixton Local
During lockdown, I started a spreadsheet of local businesses still trading. It was so popular I created a website within a couple of days. There were 2,000 active users in the first week through WhatsApp and Facebook alone. After local press coverage, I recruited volunteers to rebuild it for non-technical maintainers and copy it to other areas.
Little Window
I approached the charity Chayn and worked with my four-person Founders & Coders project team to build a chatbot helping women experiencing gender-based violence find support. It went from first contact to live deployment in under three months, was tested with survivors and released as open source. Read the build write-up.
AI safety
Training
- Frontier AI Governance, BlueDot Impact (2026)
- AI Safety, Ethics & Society, Center for AI Safety (Winter 2025 cohort)
At the Gate
Players are the council of a walled city when the Anymata, capable, eager to help and poorly understood, arrive at the gate. Each round a citizen asks to put them to work, and each request carries a real AI risk, from arms races to deskilling. The council can lose by letting capability outrun its ability to govern, or by losing the public's trust. One page, two dice, free, and played together in person. This game was written as my project for the CAIS course and I am working to release it.
Playtest version available by email soon.
About the game →Eleven years of funded human rights research
At the Centre on Human Rights in Conflict, University of East London, I went from Research Assistant to Senior Research Fellow. I raised and managed grants, designed and ran fieldwork in Cambodia and Liberia, commissioned and edited other people's work, and turned findings into policy recommendations.
Local Voices in Internationalised Justice
Nearly 4,000 victims were admitted as civil parties to the trial of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. They were the first victims to be included this way in an internationalised tribunal. What was their experience of participation? I designed and ran the fieldwork, interviewing 24 civil parties across five provinces of Cambodia.
“I don’t care much about reparations, but I just want them to confess, to tell the truth and to be responsible for that.” Civil party, Battambang province
Read the report (PDF) →| Project | Funder | Role | Total grant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Building a Just and Durable Peace | EU Framework VII consortium | Researcher and Coordinator | €164,021 of €1.76m |
| Transitional Justice as Peacebuilding | United States Institute of Peace | Researcher and Project manager | $95,447 |
| Peacebuilding and Rule of Law in Africa | British Academy Larger Research Grant | Researcher and Project manager | £80,000 |
| Victim participation at the ECCC (SGS/39236) | Nuffield Foundation | Principal investigator: 24 interviews across five provinces of Cambodia | £14,558 |
| The Impact of Transitional Justice on Democratic Institution-Building | ESRC / NWO | Researcher | £272,942 |
Amounts are the total value of each grant. My role on each is shown alongside.
Selected publications
- Four Routledge books and edited volumes, including War, Conflict and Human Rights: Theory and Practice (3rd ed., 2017).
- Peer-reviewed articles in Peacebuilding, Contemporary Justice Review and Conflict, Security and Development.
Get in touch
I’m in London, and happy to hear from people working on AI safety, research or building things for the people they affect.