My story

In the 1970s my grandfather, newly arrived in Britain as a refugee from Uganda, had symptoms of back pain, night sweats and weight loss that were dismissed by his doctor. His family would never have dreamed of questioning a doctor. By the time his spinal tuberculosis was finally diagnosed, surgery came too late to save him. I grew up with that story, and it left me with a conviction that has organised my whole career: the gap between what is known and what people are able to know is never abstract. My family lived its cost.

Everything since has been an attempt to close that gap, from one direction after another.

Medicine

I came to medicine the long way round. From 2002 to 2008 I worked as an optical advisor at Specsavers, my first exposure to patient communication, and for most of those years I was also a medical student at Leicester, qualifying in 2009. Then a decade in the NHS: foundation training, core surgical training, general surgery, trauma and orthopaedics, and emergency medicine, where I continued as a middle grade from 2015.

Medicine taught me the substance. But I kept noticing that the failures around me were rarely failures of knowledge. They were failures of transmission.

Teaching

From 2013 to 2018 I was a Clinical Teaching Fellow, teaching University of Nottingham students at Lincoln County Hospital, and that classroom became a laboratory. My MMedSci thesis built (PBL-SGT)-Fusion, a method that tests learners before each session and adapts the difficulty to the people actually in the room. Junior students mastered senior material. Adaptive teaching worked, years before AI made it cheap.

Then, in April 2017, after years of teaching others, I was diagnosed with dyslexia.

My dyslexia, diagnosed only in 2017 after years of teaching others, taught me the same lesson from the inside: education fails when it cannot adapt to the learner.

Alongside the fellowship I founded WatMed Educational, teaching more than 500 postgraduate professionals at weekend courses, and created the ID Medical School programme in partnership with ID Medical.

Broadcast

Teaching 30 people at a time was not enough. In 2015 I founded WatMed Media, a social media health broadcaster, and it became a springboard: I was a health contributor for the BBC from 2015 to 2018 and for Sky News from November 2016 to January 2021, with appearances on LBC: an estimated 110 million+ cumulative broadcast impressions.

Then came COVID-19. I answered the public’s questions live on air on 9 March 2020 as the pandemic took hold; I was on screen on 6 April 2020 as the Prime Minister was admitted to intensive care; I covered London’s major-incident declaration on 8 January 2021 as the Kent variant surged. The clips live on the broadcast page.

Systems

One person on television reaches millions for minutes. A system works while you sleep. In 2018 I moved into global medical affairs to build at that scale: three digital platforms and an EU-Canada Medical Innovation Award at AstraZeneca; a 147% increase in specialist engagement leading a team of 14 at Sanofi; and at Bayer, GME:X and D:CAM, a medical education platform reaching 50,000+ healthcare professionals across the US, Japan, India and the UK, with an 80% reduction in content cost and time-to-market. In 2025 the PM Society named me Pharma Marketing Pioneer.

Do we defer, or refer?

Through all of this I kept studying, and my doctorate, completed at Hull York Medical School in 2025, put a name to what my whole career had been circling. Interviewing 40 people fifteen months into the pandemic, I found that COVID-19 had completed a quiet revolution:

COVID-19 completed a shift from a ‘deferrer society’ to a ‘referrer society’: people no longer simply accept what authority tells them; they check, compare, and increasingly ask an AI.

My grandfather’s generation deferred. Ours refers: to search engines, to each other, and increasingly to AI. That changes what it means to communicate health, to teach, to publish. It is the single idea I most want to put to work.

AI

The doctorate is also where AI stopped being an abstraction for me. My analysis as executed ran on GPT-3 and GPT-4; mid-doctorate, in 2023, I benchmarked Claude against them on 370,000 words of interview transcripts and found it superior for nuanced qualitative analysis.

Three years later I built my first working software, a personal dashboard, with the same tools I had studied:

I planned it in an evening chat with Claude Opus 4.8, built it with Fable 5 in Claude Code the next morning. Work that once took months took a weekend. When timescales collapse this far, teaching the world to use these tools well stops being optional.

As a firm believer in the democratisation of knowledge, I relish the opportunity to shape the next decade of the intelligence age.

If any of this maps to a problem you are working on, we should talk.