Tom Smith

Tom is Director of the Spatial Data Unit and the first Chief Data Officer for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Committees (DLUHC).

Tom’s previous roles in government include founding director at the Joint Biosecurity Centre, and managing director at the Data Science Campus at the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Before joining government, he was co-founder and chief executive of Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI), a research and data ‘spin-out’ company from Oxford University.

As well as working in public sector, industry and academia, Tom has had board and advisory roles at the UN, Royal Society, Royal Statistics Society, Environment Agency, Open Data User Group, media and academic groups.

Tom has a PhD in computational neuroscience, evolving neural networks for robot control (Sussex), an MSc in knowledge-based systems (Sussex), and MA in theoretical physics (Cambridge).