With Hindsight, All Paths Look Straight.

From my birth place in South Africa, I have set off to find the paths less travelled. By bike, by foot, by truck and crowded bus on dusty road, from Arctic tundra to turquoise Turkish beaches, through Kyrgyz mountain ranges over Himalayan peaks, past Kashmiri pashmina vendors, through the Sahara desert to troubled Timbuktu, with stops in the bustling streets of London, the historic cobble stones of Cambridge and the canals of Holland, I now commute between the mountain peaks of Switzerland and the thunderstorms of Johannesburg.

I started my career at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, where I completed a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering and a major in Business French. Soon after completion, I set off to pursue a professional career in engineering consulting at Hatch. Unbeknown to me, my imminent career transition to AI was foreshadowed when I brought home the global Knowledge Management Award of the international consulting power house in 2013.

A year as operations business analyst at e-commerce fashion retailer Spree (then part of Media24) segwayed me into a new career in data and algorithms. Serving as the first data scientist of UCT’s Energy Research Center (ERC), I developed its open data and data governance competencies. My tenure culminated in publishing the first large research dataset on domestic electricity consumption in South Africa – a historic and iconic dataset that captures twenty-years of the country’s post-Apartheid electrification programme. 

My work at the ERC inspired me to start a masters degree in computer science at UCT in 2016. In the years that followed, I completed a full research masters while continuing to work at the ERC. My masters thesis incorporated expert knowledge in the evaluation of machine learning systems to ensure their local and contextual relevance. I applied this work to create customer archetypes of South African residential electricity consumers and received my masters degree with distinction. In 2019 I accepted a position as PhD candidate at TU Delft in the Netherlands to deepen my expertise in responsible AI design and socio-technical systems.

My work has been recognized and supported through many awards, including the TU Delft TPM Engineering Systems and Services department’s best paper award (2022), academic merit scholarships from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (2017, 2018) and UCT (2007, 2008), and the Special Alumni Award from UCT’s Faculty of Engineering & the Built Environment for dedication to empower people and make a difference in Africa (2014). I have received grants from the Mozilla Technology Fund (2022) and a Flash Grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation (2019). I was invited as a Young Researcher to the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (2023), and selected as a fellow of the GSO Leadership Academy (2025), the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (2022), Data Science for Social Good (2019), the TechWomen program of the US Department of State (2018) and the Young African Leadership Initiative (2017).