The Journey So Far

Hackathon Season

Builder & Competitor

I love hackathons. It's where I've met some of my closest friends and the most talented people I know. Here are some highlights:

Winning at the Google hackathon

Luke and I after winning Granola x Vercel

The 20hr team after launch in Stockholm

OpenAI Builder Days

Coral Hackathon in NYC — won $3k with Henry and Dan

Teleoperated Surgical Robotics

Final Year Dissertation

Final year dissertation at Edinburgh. Designing teleoperated robotic arms for minimally invasive surgery. Inverse kinematics, control systems, ROS. A lot of MATLAB and late nights in the lab.

Co-Founder & President

Co-founded Edinburgh's AI society with Pascual Merita Torres. I wanted a space to learn about AI and meet smart people, so we just built one. 1,000+ members in two years. We run workshops, bring in speakers from DeepMind, Spotify, Amazon and Anthropic, and host an annual AI Expo with £8,000+ in prizes given away.

Our Anthropic hackathon had 250+ people show up. One of the things I'm most proud of building. All workshop materials are open-sourced on GitHub.

Packed lecture theatre — Anthropic-sponsored intro event

Bird's eye view of the Edinburgh AI Expo

Repping Claude at Edinburgh

Teaching neural networks at a hands-on workshop

Isara Labs

AI Research Contractor

Contracting gig helping Isara hit SOTA on a popular benchmark. Most cracked team I've ever worked with. Michal Valko, Eddie Zhang, Sam Kwok , Artur Avameri, an IMO silver medallist. This team permanently raised the bar for me. Incredibly grateful I got that opportunity.

Dinner with Michal Valko and the Isara team in SF

The SF crew

AI Applied Research Engineer Intern

Built an Excel Q&A workflow from scratch and AI agents that create other AI agents using LangGraph. Both shipped to production. Automated the company's LLM benchmarking. Learned a lot (too much?) about PDFs.

Thursday pub nights with the team were one of the highlights of my summer. Cracked group of people.

V7 team — boss arm-wrestling a colleague at the pub

Hackathon that V7 sponsored

Software Engineer Intern

Atlas Marketplace team in Glasgow. Built a React + Flask dashboard to manage AWS permissions at scale. JPMC is AWS's number one client, so everything was about how it scales.

Got the internship after winning Code For Good the year before, where we built a LangChain chatbot for Glasgow Children's Hospital. Got incredibly lucky with my manager Ryan.

Code For Good 2023 — the team that got me the internship

Go-karting with the JPM team in Glasgow

Driverless Sub-team & Executive Committee

We built a self-driving car from scratch. 130+ students across Edinburgh University Formula Student, designing and racing autonomous cars. I did RL for global path optimisation on the Driverless sub-team. Won at Silverstone taking 4 of 5 award categories.

Formula Student UK at Silverstone

Security Intern

Full year at a 5-person cybersecurity startup in Letterkenny. Ransomware recovery, attack log analysis, phishing training, security blog. Didn't learn a huge amount technically, but got a good foundation in cyber.

BT Young Scientist & NeuroCONCISE Intern

Built a sentiment analysis bot at 14 to detect cyberbullying on Twitter. Won Best Technology Project at the BT Young Scientist (now Stripe Young Scientist) , awarded by HP. That opened the door to my first internship at NeuroCONCISE in Derry, a medtech startup building a wearable EEG for locked-in patients. Still pretty proud of these. They're what started everything.

SciFest Ireland — presenting the NLP cyberbullying detector

Winning Best Technology Project at the BT Young Scientist