New job: Professor of Digital Society and Policy at Bristol

I am delighted to have joined the University of Bristol as Professor of Digital Society and Policy, based in the School of Education and working across the Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences. I will also be working with the Bristol Digital Futures Institute.

This new role provides an exciting academic home for my work at the interface of computer science, education, digital policy, culture and society: how AI, data-driven and computational technologies shape institutions, citizens, public services, the economy and civic life.

I join Bristol alongside continuing my role as Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK Government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The combination feels like a natural fit, bringing together my long-standing interests in research, evidence, innovation, public policy, and the systems, institutions and infrastructures needed to support a good digital society.

I am especially pleased to be joining a university with such breadth and depth across education, social science, engineering, computer science, public policy, culture, health, data science and AI. These are exactly the kinds of interdisciplinary environments needed to address many of the questions that now sit at the centre of public debate and policymaking.

I am also enormously grateful to colleagues, students and collaborators at Swansea University, where I have worked since 2018. Swansea has been an important part of my academic and professional life, and I have learned a huge amount from colleagues across the university, Wales and the wider civic and policy landscape. Having spent all of my post-PhD academic career in Welsh higher education, I will be sorry to step away from that institutional context; but my affinity with Wales, and my interest in its education, skills, digital, civic and policy landscape, remain an important part of my academic and policy interests.

I am looking forward to working with new colleagues and students at Bristol, while continuing to contribute to research, policy and practice across the UK and beyond.