Now
Last updated: September 2026
Teaching
I am Associate Professor (Education) at the Department of Methodology, as of August 2026. In the 2026/2027 academic year I am shadowing my colleague Dr Stuart Bramwell on MY202A, and building an AI tutor to support our students’ self-study. In the Winter Term I am teaching MY105W (Data for Data Science) to undergraduates and MY481 Generative AI for Social Science Research to Masters students.
From January 2022 to July 2026 I was at the LSE Data Science Institute, and in my final academic year there (2025/2026) I convened these courses:
DS105 (Data for Data Science): introductory, delivered twice a year. Terminal and API data collection, data cleaning, pandas, collaborative GitHub workflows. ~165 students across Autumn and Winter Terms 2025/2026
DS205 (Advanced Data Manipulation): advanced. REST APIs, web scraping, NLP, RAG pipelines. Capstone project with the Transition Pathway Initiative Centre. ~40 students in Winter Term 2025/2026
ME204 (Data Engineering for the Social World): summer school. An intensive three week version of DS105 for international and professional audiences.
I have also taught DS101 (Fundamentals of Data Science) and DS202 (Data Science for Social Scientists, now called Machine Learning for Social Scientists). All of these DS courses have since moved to the Department of Methodology too, and their codes changed from DS to MY (DS105 is now MY105, for example).
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 MY105W that adapts its responses to where students are in the weekly learning progression. The system uses a skills taxonomy written in XML 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 my teaching buyout this Autumn Term (September to December 2026), I am developing the proactive version, a tutor that initiates contact with students before they ask. I am testing it first with our MY202A students this term, and I will then deploy a fuller version in MY105W in the Winter Term (January to March 2027).
GENIAL: Generative AI as a Catalyst for Learning
Project site · Led jointly 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 patterns of student engagement with generative AI 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 distinction between performance and learning, 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
- Member, AI Coordination and Advisory Group
- Member, Departmental AI Leads Forum
- Member, Data Science Education Forum
Recent speaking
- Jul 2026: Imperial College London, GenAI Shorts. Invited talk, “Moving with the course: designing a time aware AI tutor for data science teaching.”
- Jun 2026: LSE Eden Centre Education Symposium. “Do AI course tutors scaffold learning or smooth away the struggle?”
- May 2026: SciencesPo, Paris (AI in the Public Sphere). Invited talk, “Forming Computational Social Scientists in the Era of Generative AI.”
- Mar 2026: PIE Live Europe, London. Panel, “Ask me anything about AI (digital fight club).”
- Dec 2025: PIE Live North America, Chicago. Workshop with Nick Gilbert (LSE CIO), “Moving AI from pilot to scale in higher education.”
- 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.”