Curriculum Vitae
Data Science and AI leader with 10+ years of experience delivering enterprise-scale analytics, machine learning, and AI solutions across banking, telecommunications, research, and higher education.
PhD in Computer Science (In Progress)
University of the Witwatersrand
Research: Physics-informed self-supervised learning for SAR-based flood extent mapping, with applications to insurance risk and data-scarce regions. Focuses on the intersection of remote sensing, self-supervised learning, and computational hydrology.
Lead Data Scientist (Acting Head of Data Science)
ABSA Insurance
Leading the Insurance Data Science capability across underwriting, retention, fraud, telematics, and climate risk. Championed hyperpersonalisation processing 2M+ daily signals. Modernised the telematics platform using Ubunye Engine, reducing latency from 2 months to under 24 hours. Developed geospatial flood-risk models across 230,000+ properties.
Senior Data Scientist
Vodacom
Led a high-performing team of 10 data scientists/engineers. Architected the Smart Generator Optimisation platform across 15,000+ sites, saving ≈R1 billion. Built streaming pipelines processing 25M+ daily events using Kafka, PySpark, Kubernetes, and a custom PyFlink stream-processing framework.
Machine Learning Research Scientist
IBM Research
Developed machine learning and geospatial analytics for environmental and climate-risk applications. Built predictive systems with TensorFlow and distributed data platforms. Deployed climate-forecasting models into IBM PAIRS Geoscope platform. Contributed to the Gauteng COVID-19 risk-index dashboard.
Data Scientist
Business Intelligence Services - University of the Witwatersrand
Developed recommendation and analytics systems supporting institutional planning and student success. Built reporting and analytics workflows using Python, SQL, and Power BI. Developed a clustering-based recommendation engine generating over R2M annually in government subsidy. Trained 76+ staff and students.
MSc in Computer Science (Distinction)
University of the Witwatersrand
Thesis: Learning Level Set Method by Echo State Network for Image Segmentation. Proposed a novel spatiotemporal deep-learning formulation of variational level set segmentation, benchmarking five recurrent and convolutional architectures.
Data Scientist & Software Engineer
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR)
Developed predictive analytics and operational intelligence systems supporting municipalities. Built Django-based decision-support systems serving 17 municipalities (including Cape Town and Gauteng) to identify operational bottlenecks and improve service delivery.
System Analyst & Support
ZAR X
Provided systems analysis and operational support for a newly launched stock exchange serving 13,000+ clients, supporting trading platform stability during go-live and early operations.
BSc Honours in Computer Science
University of the Witwatersrand
Project: Wildfire Estimation Using Kernel Density Estimators.
BSc in Computational & Applied Mathematics and Astronomy
University of the Witwatersrand
Mathematical modelling, astrophysics, simulation, and numerical methods.