Now

Last updated: April 2026

Teaching

I am moving from the LSE Data Science Institute to the Department of Methodology in August 2026, when I take up a post as Associate Professor (Education). Until then, I convene three data science courses at the LSE Data Science Institute:

  • DS105DS105 (Data for Data Science): introductory, ~165 students across Autumn and Winter terms. Terminal and API data collection, data cleaning, pandas, collaborative GitHub workflows.
  • DS205DS205 (Advanced Data Manipulation): advanced, ~40 students in Winter term. REST APIs, web scraping, NLP, RAG pipelines. Capstone project with the Transition Pathway Initiative Centre.
  • ME204ME204 (Data Engineering for the Social World): summer school. An intensive three-week version of DS105 for international and professional audiences.

I also collaborated on the AI Leadership Accelerator, a six-month online executive education programme run by LSE Online and in collaboration with the LSE Department of Management.

Research

AI and Education Fellowship (2025-2027)

I am one of LSE’s fellows on the AI and Education Fellowship, building a proactive GenAI tutor for DS105 that adapts its responses to where students are in the weekly learning progression. The system uses an XML-based skills taxonomy to keep the chatbot aligned with each week’s pedagogical objectives.

I have already built a custom bot that is temporally aware and I tested it with my students in the 2025-26 academic year. The reception was quite positive and it seems like the bot made a positive difference in students’ learning, but let’s see what the data says! I’m currently going through the initial data cleaning and analysis.

During a teaching buyout from September to December 2026, I will be developing the proactive version: a tutor that initiates contact with students rather than waiting for them to ask. I will test it on the DS202 course on machine learning fundamentals taught by Dr. Stuart Bramwell in the Autumn Term 2026/2027 and then deploy a fuller version in DS105 in the Winter Term 2026/2027 (Jan-Mar 2027).

GENIAL: Generative AI as a Catalyst for Learning

Project site · Co-led with Dr Marcos Barreto (Department of Statistics), Dr Dorottya Sallai (Department of Management), and Dr Casey Kearney (School of Public Policy). Funded by the LSE Eden Centre and the LSE Data Science Institute.

We started GENIAL as a focus group in early 2023 to explore how students use generative AI during coursework but soon expanded to a research project. Our first research cycle (2023-25) analysed ChatGPT conversation logs and Git commit histories from students in six courses across LSE. That analysis produced the GENIAL Framework, a diagnostic tool that maps student-GenAI engagement patterns onto Kolb’s experiential learning stages.

I am now using the GENIAL Framework to investigate how students use generative AI during coursework in a new research cycle for my AI and Education fellowship (2025-2027).

Writing

I am documenting what I learn as I build and test these systems on this blog. Recent and forthcoming posts cover the performance-versus-learning distinction, how to infer learning from process traces, and the different names researchers have given to the phenomenon of students delegating their thinking to AI.

Institutional roles

  • Deputy Head of Department for Education (de facto), Data Science Institute
  • Member, AI Coordination and Advisory Group
  • Member, Departmental AI Leads Forum
  • Member, Data Science Education Forum

Recent speaking

  • Oct 2025: LSE Eden Centre AI in Education Showcase. “A custom Claude project setup with time-sensitive learning boundaries.” Video.
  • Oct 2025: Cambridge Generative AI in Education Conference (2nd edition). “Using an agentic AI strategy to scale rigorous feedback in complex coding projects.”
  • Jun 2025: St Mary’s Festival of Learning and Teaching. Keynote: “Can Generative AI act as a Catalyst for Learning? Or are we asking the wrong question?”
  • Jun 2025: Fundación Ramón Areces, Madrid. Three-day masterclass “Intelligent Futures: AI and the Transformation of Society” (with Dr Dorottya Sallai, via LSE Consulting).
  • May 2025: DELab UW Conference, University of Warsaw. “Bridging the Learning Divide: Mitigating Generative AI’s Impact on Student Engagement and Critical Thinking.”

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Footnotes

  1. About the /now page movement.↩︎