My story

There were no doctors in my immediate family, and the first thing I understood about medicine was what it had cost us. Then, at fourteen, I became the patient: hospitalised with suspected viral encephalitis after a holiday in India was cut short. I remember being incredibly ill, yet at the same time fascinated by the cannula in my arm and the medicine going through, making me better. I have wanted to be a doctor ever since.

The third encounter was different. In September 2020 I came off my bike, had a five-minute seizure and lost forty-five minutes to retrograde amnesia: forced back, this time, into the patient’s perspective. I was grateful that what I knew from running trauma calls let me advocate for myself, and I now work hard, every day, to help others advocate for themselves.

What I took from all of it is a conviction that has organised my whole career: medical knowledge is a privilege and in the intelligence age we have the opportunity to democratise access to that knowledge.

Everything since has been an attempt to close that gap, from one direction after another.

Medicine

I came to medicine the long way round. From 2002 to 2008 I worked as an optical advisor at Specsavers, my first exposure to patient communication, and for most of those years I was also a medical student at Leicester, qualifying in 2009. Then a decade in the NHS: foundation training, core surgical training, general surgery, trauma and orthopaedics, and emergency medicine, where I continued as a middle grade from 2015.

Medicine taught me the substance. But I kept noticing that the failures around me were rarely failures of knowledge. They were failures of transmission.

Teaching

From 2013 to 2018 I was a Clinical Teaching Fellow, teaching University of Nottingham students at Lincoln County Hospital, and that classroom became a laboratory. My MMedSci thesis built (PBL-SGT)-Fusion, a method that tests learners before each session and adapts the difficulty to the people actually in the room. Junior students mastered senior material. Adaptive teaching worked, years before AI made it cheap.

I had got through medical school by brute force: pen, paper, music, and hours of passive learning to make up for a way of reading I did not yet have a name for.

Then, in April 2017, after years of teaching others, I was diagnosed with dyslexia.

This taught me the same lesson from the inside: education fails when it cannot adapt to the learner.

Alongside the fellowship I founded WatMed Educational, teaching more than 500 postgraduate professionals at weekend courses, and created the ID Medical School programme in partnership with ID Medical.

Broadcast

Teaching 30 people at a time was not enough. My broadcasting work has now spanned more than ten years across social and mainstream media. In 2015 I founded WatMed Media, a social media health broadcaster, and it became a springboard: I was a health contributor for the BBC from 2015 to 2018 and for Sky News from November 2016 to January 2021, with appearances on LBC.

Then came COVID-19. I answered the public’s questions live on air on 9 March 2020 as the pandemic took hold; I was on screen on 6 April 2020 as the Prime Minister was admitted to intensive care; I covered London’s major-incident declaration on 8 January 2021 as the Kent variant surged. The clips live on the broadcast page.

Systems

One person on television reaches millions for minutes. A system works while you sleep. In 2018 I moved into global medical affairs to build at that scale: three digital platforms and an EU-Canada Medical Innovation Award at AstraZeneca; a 147% increase in specialist engagement leading a team of 14 at Sanofi; and at Bayer, GME:X and D:CAM, taking a medical education platform to four markets and building a modular methodology for reusable, fully compliant content. In 2025 the PM Society named me Pharma Marketing Pioneer.

Do we defer, or refer?

Through all of this I kept studying, and my doctorate, completed at Hull York Medical School in 2025, put a name to what my whole career had been circling. Interviewing 40 people fifteen months into the pandemic, I found that COVID-19 had completed a quiet revolution:

COVID-19 completed a shift from a ‘deferrer society’ to a ‘referrer society’: people no longer simply accept what authority tells them; they check, compare, and increasingly ask an AI.

My grandfather’s generation deferred. Ours refers: to search engines, to each other, and increasingly to AI. That changes what it means to communicate health, to teach, to publish. It is the single idea I most want to put to work.

AI

The doctorate is also where AI stopped being an abstraction for me. My analysis as executed ran on GPT-3 and GPT-4; mid-doctorate, in 2023, I benchmarked Claude against them on 370,000 words of interview transcripts and found it superior for nuanced qualitative analysis.

Three years later I built my first working software, a personal dashboard, with the same tools I had studied:

I planned it in an evening chat with Claude Opus 4.8, built it with Fable 5 in Claude Code the next morning. Work that once took months took a weekend. When timescales collapse this far, teaching the world to use these tools well stops being optional.

As a firm believer in the democratisation of knowledge, I relish the opportunity to shape the next decade of the intelligence age.

If any of this maps to a problem you are working on, we should talk.