Powered by proven talent from around the world

From Silicon Valley's most experienced operators to Europe's sharpest minds.

Meet The Team

 

Our team consists of world-class talent from science, machine learning and business. Drawn from Google, Just Eat, Microsoft, Amazon, BBC, Shell, Benevolent AI and the Environment Agency, the Cervest team has comprehensively proven an ability to deliver and scale globally. 

We come from, and maintain connections with, highly respected academic institutions, including Cambridge, Harvard, Imperial College London, UC Berkeley, University College London and The Alan Turing Institute. 

Together, we have published more than 80 peer-reviewed scientific papers in leading journals such as National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Climate Change, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS), NeurIPS, ICML, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Astrophysical Journal, and Advances in Space Research.

Our diverse team is 13 nationalities strong, one-third female, and majority post-grad-level educated. Currently based in London, we’re expanding to the US in 2021.

 

Join The Team

Raúl Álvarez

Product Designer

Ernesta Baniulyte

Product Designer

Iggy Bassi

Founder & CEO

Soukaina Bouaziz

Software Engineer

Steve Burtenshaw

Software Engineer

Lilia Caiado

Climate Specialist

Dr Ben Calderhead

Chief Scientific Advisor

Dr Maxim Chernetskiy

Remote Sensing Scientist

Dr Luis Costa

Climate Adaptation Scientist

Conan Cook

Head of Product Engineering

Aidan Coyne

Junior Researcher

Owen van Eer

Statistical Scientist

Jevgenij Gamper

Senior Statistical Scientist

Oliver Godby

Head of Platform & Systems Engineering

Michael Griffiths

Senior Engineer

Mark Hodgson

Chief Business Officer

Sachin Kapila

Chief Policy Officer

Ramani Lachyan 

Junior Research Scientist 

Dr. Benjamin Laken 

Earth Scientist 

Raj Mahapatra

General Counsel & Head of IP

Anna Moses

Head of Operations

Kanisha Ncube

EA & Team Coordinator

Alex Rahin

Chief Product and Technology Officer

Michael Raymond

Senior Engineer

Dr Maxime Rischard

Lead Scientist

Kate Rodger

Head of Customer & Partner Development

Federico Roffi

Software Engineer

Lukas Scholtes

Statistical Scientist

Dorota Siwek

Software Engineer

Tom Stokes

Data Engineer

Duncan Walker

Senior Engineer

Al Ward 

Head of Delivery

Areeba Yusaf 

Software Engineer

Dr. Laura Zamboni 

Climate Scientist

Harrison Zhu 

Affiliated PhD Student

Founder’s Story


After over a decade building, leading and advising global organisations, including Fortune 500 companies and sovereigns, in 2009 I launched my first social impact initiative—a farm-to-market agribusiness in West Africa.

The business lifted thousands of farmers into markets and improved their incomes through sustainable yield gains. We had to confront first-hand the impacts of extreme climate events and natural resource volatility. Combined with what I had learned through one of my previous data analytics ventures, this led me to a new idea.

I passionately believe AI is the key to helping businesses make more sustainable and cost effective decisions in the face of growing climate variability. So, I set out to find like-minded people from around the world to make this vision a reality.

Now our team is building an Earth Science AI powered platform that will provide climate security for you, and restore and build the resilience of our planet.

Iggy Bassi, Founder & CEO

Iggy Bassi 
Founder & CEO

Iggy has a 20-year track record of building companies and advising global organizations (inc. Fortune 500 and sovereigns) on competitiveness, technology, and sustainability.

An advocate for climate-smart innovations, his first impact led agribusiness, GADCO, was supported by Acumen Fund, Soros, BMGF/AGRA, World Bank, and Syngenta. Its impact featured in UNDP, World Economic Forum, FT, Guardian and Huff Post.
A thought leader in natural capital, agriculture, and analytics, Iggy has spoken at forums including UN-FAO, World Bank, ICRD, Harvard, and the UK Government. His earlier career included investment banking, strategy consulting, and analytics software. He holds a master’s from the University of Cambridge (ESRC Scholar) and is a member of BMW Responsible Leaders.

Dr Ben Calderhead
Chief Scientific Advisor

Ben Calderhead, a pivotal part of the Cervest team since 2017, is one of the world’s foremost experts in Bayesian uncertainty quantification and computational statistics. Focused on developing state-of-the-art, computationally efficient statistical methods, he is passionate about using machine learning to tackle complex real-world prediction problems.

A leader in this field for more than a decade, Ben is an assistant professor and lecturer at Imperial College London, teaching statistical modelling and machine learning, and supervising PhD research on Monte Carlo methodology, probabilistic numerics and Bayesian volatility modelling in financial markets. Prior to this he was a visiting researcher at both Harvard and MIT (in 2013 and 2014), and a Research Fellow at UCL. He has given invited talks at leading research institutes around the world, including at Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Alan Turing Institute in London.

With more than 1500 citations to his name in world-leading academic journals and conferences, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, NIPS, Bayesian Analysis, Biophysical Journal and Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Ben is extensively published on topics including Markov chain Monte Carlo methodology, single ion channel modelling, and statistical inference using differential equations.

Ben holds a PhD and MSc in Computational Statistics, funded by a Microsoft Research scholarship, and an MSci in Mathematics from the University of Glasgow (2002-2010).

André DuBuisson 
Advisor

Andre is a seasoned Product Management specialist with 15+ years experience in delivering, managing and growing global B2C / B2B products across multiple sectors.

Prior to Cervest, Andre held product leadership positions in start-up, scale-up and corporate environments. His broad experience covers products, platforms, UX, data, AI, customer loyalty, SaaS and marketplaces.

As one of Cervest’s early team members Andre helped drive product strategy, roadmap development, market analysis and beta platform launch. Andre continues to advise on product strategy.

Dr Theo Damoulas
Senior Machine Learning Advisor

Theo is an award-winning Associate Professor in Data Science with a joint appointment in Computer Science and Statistics at Warwick University.

A thought leader in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Bayesian statistics, Theo’s specific interests lie in the application of spatiotemporal inference, learning with humans in the loop, kernel (covariance) methods and evidence integration in the fields of biology, sustainability, ecology, and engineering. Theo’s role at Cervest draws all of these interests together.

Theo Damoulas joined the University of Warwick in 2015 from New York University where he was an Assistant Professor of Research (2013-2015). Before that he was a Research Associate in the department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He finished his PhD thesis titled Probabilistic Multiple Kernel Learning in 2009 at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow.

A Turing Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and affiliated with NYU as a Visiting Exchange Professor at the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), Theo has notched up more than 1000 citations and been published in high-profile academic journals including Nature Climate Change, Bioinformatics, ICML, NIPS, AI Magazine, Statistical Data Science and Biological Conservation, as well as two best paper accolades and two reproducible research awards.

Theo holds an MSc in Informatics (Distinction) from the University of Edinburgh (2003-2004) and an MEng in Engineering (1st Class) from the University of Manchester (1999-2003).

Dr Luis Costa
Climate Adaptation Scientist

Dr Luís Costa joins Cervest with more than a decade’s expertise working at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research – a top think-tank renowned for its cutting-edge research in the fields of climate impacts and sustainability research.

An engineer turned researcher, he lead climate change adaptation studies for European research projects, the German Ministry of Environment and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GmbH). He holds strong expertise in GIS, remote sensing and climate models, as well as being an advocate for a concerted global strategy on climate adaptation.

Luis graduated with a Diploma degree in Environmental Engineering from Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro in 2006 and received his PhD from the University of Greifswald in 2013.

Owen van Eer
Statistical Scientist

Owen joined Cervest after collaborating on his final project for the MSc in Statistics at Imperial College London in 2018. His project was rewarded with the Winton Prize for best dissertation and he graduated the MSc with a Distinction. Since joining, he has helped develop some of the world’s most advanced Bayesian machine learning algorithms, designed to generate accurate and real-time crop yield predictions.

Previously, Owen graduated with a first-class BSc degree at the Erasmus School of Economics, where he won a best paper award in 2015 for his study on the optimisation of drone delivery networks. Afterwards, he gained valuable experience in data science consultancy at Veneficus and in business analytics at Naspers. Owen is now excited to make a positive impact on the world by solving the big problems we are tackling at Cervest.

Oliver Godby
Head of Platform & Systems Engineering

Oliver is a veteran technologist and software engineer with 17 years’ experience working in innovative environments across the spectrum of start-ups, mature businesses and large institutional organisations. Recent engagements include the migration and modernisation of the BBC World Service (29 websites in 14 months) and two years working in the emerging start-up market in Manila, building innovative, scalable and cost effective platforms.

He is experienced in Cloud-based application design, infrastructure, deployment and the relevant technologies and practices required to deliver consistent, scalable solutions. He holds a graduate degree from the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Raj Mahapatra
General Counsel & Head of IP

Raj has advised fast-growing companies in the UK and US on tech, social impact and public relations for more than 25 years on corporate, commercial, financial risk and intellectual property matters. Frequently navigating the complex interactions between legal jurisdictions, he combines this experience with his love of nascent regulation to better understand the intersection of technology, sustainable targets and the law.

He worked as a lawyer at Norton Rose and LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae LLP. Raj has worked with Iggy for more than 10 years, joining GADCO as Director of Legal Affairs in 2009. He graduated from the University of Bristol.

Becky Charles
Communications Lead

A former business journalist, Becky is an experienced communications consultant with eight years’ experience enhancing and protecting the reputations of ambitious and dynamic businesses from leading discount supermarket Lidl and Hearst Magazines, to ad-tech pioneer AppNexus and award-winning independent boutique marketplace Trouva.

Becky has worked with companies of all sizes and at all stages of growth from new enterprises reinventing old business models, to traditional firms pivoting their business models for a new era.

Passionate about new technology and its potential to create a better world, most recently her focus has been on leading award-winning activity for companies committed to delivering genuine change in their fields. She has a BSc in Linguistic Science from University of Reading.

Sachin Kapila
Chief Policy Officer

Sachin is a seasoned executive in sustainable development and natural capital. He served as VP in Shell’s Government Relations, responsible for interfacing with global organisations e.g. World Bank, IFC, OECD, G20 and UN – to ensure effective coordination of Shell’s policy in energy and climate.

Prior to this, he had sole Group responsibility for establishing global biodiversity policy, developing tools and guidelines for forestry carbon, as well as building relationships with global organisations.

Earlier he worked for environmental consultancy ERM covering EMEA, LATAM, and SE Asia. He holds an MSc in Environmental Technology from Imperial College.

Lilia Caiado
Climate Specialist

Lilia is an experienced sustainability and econometrics policy researcher
and a Climate CoLab Fellow at MIT working on Carbon Pricing. She has
previously held roles at CEBDS (Brazilian partner of WBCSD) and United
Nations Environment Programme, and has worked as a research assistant
at the Brazilian Institute of Applied Economic Research investigating
regulatory aspects of a carbon market in Brazil.

Lilia holds a MSc in Energy and Environmental Planning from the Federal
University of Rio the Janeiro and is currently completing a PhD at University
College London in Sustainable Resources Economics.

Mark Hodgson
Chief Business Officer

Mark has 24 years’ experience setting up and running innovative new commercial operations at global technology companies including Google and Microsoft, as well as several UK tech startups.

Most recently he served as Chief Commercial Officer at award-winning AI and augmented reality company Metail, driven by its focus on creating smarter, more sustainable ways to shop for clothes online. Prior to that he was Global Head of Google’s Partner Program based out of San Francisco and London.

Mark is a Fellow of the RSA (Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) and has an MSc in Rural and Regional Resources Planning from Aberdeen University.

Dr Maxime Rischard
Lead Scientist

Maxime completed his PhD in Statistics at Harvard University, having originally studied Physics and Astrophysics at UC Berkeley.

With specific expertise in spatiotemporal models and computational methods, he has also worked at Google Geo as a quantitative analyst developing a geostatistical model of local business churn, and as a software developer and data scientist responsible for building prediction models at Gambit Research.

Maxime’s research and publications cover a wide range of topics in spatial statistics, such as bias correction in historical climate data, spatial methodologies for causal inference, and computational methods for Bayesian model selection.

Conan Cook
Head of Product Engineering

Having studied at the University of Edinburgh, Conan has worked as a full-stack engineer, lead and manager.

He has a keen interest in entrepreneurship and has been building products and bringing them to market in start-ups for over ten years.  Focused on the human side of software engineering, he’s delivered applications in sustainability (AMEE), finance (Markit, Entrepreneur First) and e-commerce (Style.com, Bright North).  He connects people at the intersection of product, engineering and management to build effective teams and scale products.

Conan is now committed to mission-driven projects, and joined Cervest in 2019 to help solve some of the largest problems facing the world today, using his extensive expertise to bring the future of prediction to today’s climate challenges.

Jevgenij Gamper
Statistical Scientist

Jev is currently completing a PhD in machine learning and medical imaging at the University of Warwick in the UK. He has a master’s in mathematics from Warwick Mathematics Institute, and an undergraduate degree in mathematics and finance completed in North Carolina, USA.

Joining Cervest with extensive expertise in applying deep learning models to giga-pixel medical and remote sensing images for semantic segmentation, classification and unsupervised learning, Jev has previously worked on machine learning methods for validating exo-planetary signal in Kepler satellite time series data, cell tracking in fluorescence images, as well as financial time series forecasting.

Jev’s research involves building deep learning models that are robust and generalise, and creating automatic machine learning tools for giga-pixel imaging. This involves research in topics, such as selection bias and its effects, hyper-parameter optimisation, and automatic model validation.

Anna Moses
Head of Operations

Anna has broad experience helping organisations to define and operationalise their processes in order to achieve ambitious business objectives.

Anna has worked across the public, private, and charity sectors with a focus on organisational transformation through business analysis and behavioural science-focused change management, at organisations including the UK House of Commons, the Parliamentary Digital Service and leading US healthcare consultancy The Advisory Board Company.

Inspired by Cervest’s commitment to using technology for good, through both the delivery of game-changing products and an inclusive working environment, Anna is passionate about being part of the solution to the climate crisis.

She has a BA in Political Science and History from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and also attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Michael Griffiths
Senior Engineer

Michael has been building software for over a decade as both a developer and analyst. He has worked and consulted in a broad spectrum of domains – including insurance, payments and e-commerce – for both early-stage startups and established companies. He is also a passionate open-source developer, being a co-maintainer of a number of developer tools for the Clojure programming language. Further, he has been a teacher for the ClojureBridge organisation, which provides free programming workshops for underrepresented groups in tech.

A dedicated environmentalist, having worked for the National Laboratory Service arm of the UK Environment Agency before entering the software industry, he joined Cervest in 2019 with a commitment to use his expertise to build flexible and scalable distributed software systems to help our world adapt to the growing climate crisis, while promoting sustainability and science-driven decision making.

Michael holds a B.Sc. in Theoretical Physics from University College London.

Agnes Schim van der Loeff
Research Resident (now Policy Researcher)

Agnes joined Cervest after completing her BA in Arabic and Development Studies from SOAS University of London. She is interested in the intersection of the social, economic and political dimensions of climate change and passionate about climate justice. During her studies she was also engaged in environmental activism, including as environment officer in the SOAS students’ union.

Agnes started at Cervest as a research resident exploring the ethical implications of AI in relation to climate change, which resulted in a paper selected for an oral presentation at the NeurIPS 2019 workshop on AI for social good. Building on this, she is developing an ethical framework for Cervest. As policy researcher she now does research on the regulatory context of Cervest’s work and on emerging policies relating to climate change. .

Kate Rodger
Head of Customer & Partnership Development

Kate’s background is in business development and partnership management. Since graduating from the University of Bath in French, Spanish and International Relations, Kate has worked in various commercial roles in a series of international and UK startups. Her experience has taken her down many different avenues, from working in Argentina and India to setting up a tennis-tech startup.

Kate most recently led a team at a London-based AI and Computer Vision start-up with the goal to make online shopping more personalised and sustainable. She is passionate about using her experience and learnings to help Cervest achieve its vision of a world where everyone is empowered to make decisions that improve the long term resilience of our planet.

Ernesta Baniulyte

Ernesta Baniulyte 
Product Designer

Ernesta has been a full-stack product designer for more than five years. She has valuable experience in the B2B, B2C and B2B2C worlds, and while working at both agencies and product/service companies, she has learned to develop UX research infrastructures to support strategy.

At Cervest, Ernesta contributes to all stages of the product development process – from initial ideation to the exacting detail of UI design – finding new ways to visualise data, and ensure our product is intuitive and user friendly.

Ernesta’s decision to join Cervest was inspired by her desire to make the world a safer, better and more aware place.

Ramani Lachyan 
Junior Research Scientist

Ramani joined Cervest after obtaining her Master’s in Physics from ETH, Zurich. She brings with her valuable experience gained through working on model building and data simulation pertaining to neutrino physics.

Ramani has joined Cervest as a Junior Research Scientist and will be working on creating algorithms that allow for the extraction of physical observables from data from a range of sources.

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Lukas Scholtes 
Statistical Scientist

Lukas completed his maths BSc at ETH Zurich, followed by an MSc in statistics at Imperial College. He wrote his MSc thesis in collaboration with Cervest, on the modelling of North American wheat yields via Bayesian parametric and non-parametric methods.

Following an internship in the NGO sector in Bangladesh and a stint in the world of fintech, Lukas comes to Cervest, excited to apply himself to the challenges that are arising as a consequence of unsustainable land-use policies and climate change.

Aidan Coyne
Junior Researcher

Aidan is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Science and Engineering at University College London with a focus on computer science and data informatics.

At Cervest, Aidan is working on researching and assimilating a database of articles categorising the reasons for extreme decreases in crop yields across Europe. The information will be used to help predict the impact of weather events on crop yield and contribute to  Cervest’s ability to bring clarity to decision making around climatic and extreme events.

While studying, she also volunteers with environmental conservation groups and youth engagement programmes.

Jasmine Thompson
Engineering Resident

Jasmine’s background is primarily in Python programming with a focus on data analysis and visualisation.

Since graduating, she has worked on data insights for a London-based dating app startup, helping the company understand the user base and guide new growth. She is now excited to use her skills to help Cervest deliver playback data and useful data analysis and is passionate about the potential of data science, machine learning and visualisation tools.

 

While studying at Westcliff High School for Girls she was involved in a variety of projects including GUI design for BAE Systems and data collection for a surveillance vehicle project sponsored by Leonardo S.p.A. She was also the Data Analyst for a long-running Southend Youth Council project that advocated for students having better mental health services in school.

Kate Chkhaidze
Machine Learning Scientist

Kate joined Cervest after completing her PhD study at the Institute of Cancer Research, University of London. Her Project was on statistical and computational modelling of cancer evolution. Her educational background is in pure mathematics (BSc – Tbilisi State University) and statistics (MSc – Imperial College London). Before deciding to study for a PhD, she worked as a junior analyst/developer at the Bank of Georgia and in parallel was giving lectures in Statistics to undergraduate students in Tbilisi for almost two years.

At Cervest, she will be working as a Machine Learning Scientist on crop classification problems. She loves the mission and goal of the company and is very excited to be a part of the process of achieving it.

Harrison Zhu

Currently, Harrison is working on his PhD in Statistical Machine Learning as part of the industrial collaboration between Cervest and the Centre for Doctoral Training in Modern Statistics and Statistical Machine Learning at Imperial College London and Oxford University, which is funded by EPSRC. Harrison completed his MSci in Mathematics at Imperial College London and Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, where he wrote a thesis on the prediction of crop yields via satellite data under the supervision of Ben Calderhead.

He is especially interested in kernel methods, probabilistic numerics and meta-learning with applications to environmental sciences and agriculture, and is currently supervised by Seth Flaxman (Imperial) and Maxime Rischard (Cervest). He recently completed a project on `Bag Models for Crop Yield Predictions` with Maxime Rischard, Owen van Eer (Cervest), Dino Sejdinovic (Oxford) and Seth Flaxman, where he drew connections between different kernel methods for multiresolution yield and satellite data, with a focus on crop yield predictions.

He has also worked on 3D point cloud retrieval algorithms at Shell.ai, where he developed a novel methodology with Farhad Bazyari and Joao Domingos. In his spare time, Harrison likes playing around with software, jogging in Hyde park and reading academic papers. Harrison speaks English, Mandarin and French.

headshot of mike raymond - data engineering team

Michael Raymond
Senior Engineer

Michael is a full-stack developer with years of experience in a wide range of languages and technologies. He has worked on high-traffic, customer facing websites, and is especially interested in distributed systems and cloud infrastructure.

Having studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic languages at Cambridge and then Viking Studies at UCL, Michael parleyed his linguistic skills into a career in software and has never looked back.

When not wrangling data and cutting code, Michael likes to read, go to concerts, spend time with his cats, play guitar badly, cook and learn about esoteric programming languages

Excited by the company’s mission, he has joined Cervest to help build  our data platform.

headshot of Maksim Chernetskiy

Maxim Chernetskiy
Remote Sensing Scientist

Maxim has been working on Earth Observation / Remote Sensing for more than a decade, and has joined Cervest after his postdoctoral studies at University College London (UCL) in the Department of Geography and  The Mullard Space Science Laboratory.

His expertise lie in the application of remote sensing methods for retrieval of key land parameters and his studies include methods for retrieval of leaf area index and fraction of photosynthetically active radiation, degradation of vegetation near large industrial centres, lake phytoplankton blooming, 3D reconstruction of the surface from very high resolution satellite video and making digital terrain models for candidate lunar landing sites.

Maxim holds an Engineering degree from Siberian Federal University (Russia). He was supported by the European Commission Marie Curie Programme to take training in GMES (COPERNICUS) Initial Operations-Network for Earth Observation Research Training (GIONET) followed by obtaining a PhD from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany.

Federico is a full-stack engineer with a passion for front-end technologies and data visualisation.

Lately, he has been working with startups in different domains including video streaming (Sporfie), analytics (OpenSignal) and drug discovery (BenevolentAI). He built UIs and visualisations powered by the integration of complex data/AI pipelines.

In 2017 he travelled in Patagonia and fell in love with its mesmerising nature. Talking with locals he discovered how quickly and undeniably the climate was changing, with increasingly higher temperatures and lower snowfalls.  Since then he’s very concerned about the future and worried that he and the future generations will not be able to visit those beautiful places before they disappear.

He joined Cervest curious to understand more about our planet and committed to working on finding a solution for the climate crisis.

Dorota Siwek
Software Engineer

Dorota has a Master of Science in Geodesy and Cartography.
During her course of study she learnt how to process satellite data, analyse photogrammetric images, and create informative maps (useful skills at Cervest!)
Dorota began her career as an accountant, but quickly realised that with current advances in technology, her job could be easily automated in the future.
Dorota is excited about the opportunity to combine her academic background in geodesy and cartography with her engineering profession, and help Cervest achieve their important goals.

Tom Stokes
Data Engineer

Tom completed his Physics MSc at Imperial College London, which marked an initial exposure to programming in Python, as applied to modelling physical systems.
This burgeoning passion led him towards IT consultancy and the opportunity to work across a range of projects in central government bodies, with influence at a national scale.
When not knee-deep in code and data, Tom can usually be found cycling on the outskirts of London or down the local cinema.
Tom is delighted to be joining Cervest in tackling the Climate Crisis – the great challenge of our time

Alex Rahin
Chief Product and Technology Officer

Alex is an entrepreneurial technology leader with over 25 years of hands-on experience in developing and executing innovative product and technology strategies.

Prior to Cervest, Alex served as Chief Product & Technology Officer at Beamly, a technology and data company delivering data platforms & infrastructure, data & content management solutions, and AI-powered eCommerce analytics, leading Beamly to a successful exit in 2020.

Before working at Beamly, Alex served as Chief Data Officer at Just Eat, where he built an end-to-end data organization, leading the company’s data-driven transformation with the launch of a unified customer data platform and scalable machine learning products

Earlier in his career, Alex held prominent roles at Zalando, Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett Packard, and three technology startups achieving successful exits in all three.

Alex holds a BSc in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

Kanisha Ncube
EA & Team Coordinator

Kanisha completed her BA Hons in Business Management & Mandarin at the University of Westminster.

Passionate about diversity & inclusion and startups, she has had the opportunity to work with various impactful organisations and is thrilled to join team Cervest in achieving their vision.

Ravi Mahapatra
Junior Researcher

Ravi is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences degree at University College London.

He has a wide range of interests across climate change, politics and data analytics.

At Cervest, Ravi applies his interests and assists with data and market research.

Outside of Cervest and university, Ravi engages with school-led climate initiatives.

Amanda Sun
Motion Graphics Intern

A rising sophomore at Dartmouth College, Amanda’s interests lie at the nexus of climate change, research, and design. In the past, she executed UX/UI mobile designs for a tutoring startup and published colouring books for institutions across the United States. This experience with user flow, along with a background in studio art, planted her interest in motion design.

At Dartmouth, Amanda engages in environmental activism and researches mangrove governance in Southeast Asia. As a captain for Dartmouth Design Collective, Amanda helps other students grow their design skills and opportunities. Building for good is what Amanda strives for, and what she found at Cervest.

Duncan Walker
Senior Engineer

Duncan is a full-stack developer with eight years experience working with domain experts to deliver mission-driven products. He has led cross-functional Agile teams in a variety of contexts and he specialises in modeling complex domains. He has built systems for problems as diverse as broadcast scheduling, construction engineering and election exit polls.

In 2020 he came to Cervest from the BBC where he was Principal Engineer working on content product production workflow for News, Sport and BBC Worldwide. He joined Cervest because he thinks climate change is one of the most pressing problems of our time and relishes the opportunity to develop part of the solution. He is working on our data platform that enables our cutting edge earth science AI.

When he is not developing digital products he usually found gardening, cycling or watching independent cinema.

Duncan holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Manchester.

Dr. Benjamin Laken
Earth Scientist

Benjamin is an Earth Scientist, with more than 10 years experience in the public and private sector.

He has worked on problems ranging climate change, signal detection, scientific software development and geospatial data visualisations. He has also supported the development of open source web platforms for real-time decision making for management of natural resources.

Benjamin is committed to applying his energy to the Climate Crisis, and believes that with a concerted effort we can limit environmental collapse and enable a smooth transition to a carbon-neutral economy and more equitable future for all.

Benjamin is a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, and holds a Ph.D. in Physical Geography from Sussex University.

Dr. Laura Zamboni
Climate Scientist

Laura is a climate scientist with more than 10 years of experience conducting research at leading academic institutions such as UCLA, The University of Chicago, and the Argonne National Laboratory.  Her expertise embraces different areas such as seasonal forecasts, extreme weather events, climate models’ performance, and uncertainty quantification with a focus on the physical mechanisms related to the occurrence of rainfall. 

She designed and performed climate simulations that could only be run on the Argonne supercomputer, one of the world’s fastest, and has subsequently prototyped a data management process to accelerate data readiness to enable analysis.

Her profound admiration for Nature and its workings led her to earn an MS in Physics from the University of Bologna (Italy). While completing a Ph.D. in Environmental Fluid Mechanics at the University of Trieste (Italy) has enabled her to focus on solving the leading challenge Nature (humans included) face today.

In her spare time, Laura admires the natural world through the lens of photography.

Areeba Yusaf
Software Engineer

Areeba is a full-stack developer with experience in various different languages and technologies. She previously was at the BBC where she worked on a series of different projects including creating a statistics service for Weather Watchers, being an admin for a cross-team reusable component library and helping to build an article editor for journalists and editorial staff in BBC News and beyond.

She is looking forward to learning more about our planet and its climate and being able to put her skills as a developer to good use helping to find solutions to tackle the ever-growing problem that is the climate crisis.

Areeba has a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh.

Soukaina Bouaziz
Software Engineer

Soukaina is an innovative full stack software engineer with over 5 years of experience working across different range of industries, including fashion, banking, education, automotive, public sector…
She is committed to deliver high performing, sustainable software using her problem solving skills and diverse domain knowledge background.

Soukaina joined Cervest inspired by their mission, convinced that the only way we can begin to solve the global climate crisis is by leveraging the power of AI and ML.

She also enjoys working in cohesive and diverse team where individuals help each other in reaching their potential and achieving the best.

Raúl Álvarez
Product Designer

Raúl is a Product Designer with over 10 years of experience and a double background, on computer engineering on one hand and on traditional graphic design on the other. In these years he has moved from specialising mainly on design for mobile platforms towards designing products that are defined by being desktop oriented, with high information density and more complex interactions.

He joins Cervest with the intention of putting his skills to work in one of the pressing global issues that his generation is going to be faced with during the coming years.
He will be participating in the whole product design process, from exploring and validating ideas in the early stages, to creating production-efficient design systems and solutions.

Al Ward
Head of Delivery

Al has lead teams in product & tech and digital advertising for 15+ years.

Enabling high performing teams through appropriate ways of working and empowerment is a professional passion of his, a passion that he is eager to bring to bear to help Cervest achieve their mission.

Before working at Cervest, Al held Delivery leadership roles at Beamly, MullenLowe, Blippar and VCCP. and has a BSc in Computer Science from Teesside University.

Steve Burtenshaw
Software Engineer

Steve is a frontend developer with over 5 years experience. Having trained as a designer, Steve is passionate about component based design systems, accessibility and solving problems to improve user experiences.

He has worked for across sectors including telecommunications, charities, law firms, insurance, banking, motor sport and air travel.

Outside of work Steve enjoys plant-based cooking, the outdoors, music production and keeping his two cats entertained.