The members

• Innovation Consultant - Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Human-Robot Interaction

        University of Plymouth

Andy is a Chartered Accountant by trade and spent 12 years working at Deloitte, one of the Big 4 Global Professional Services Firms. During his time at Deloitte Andy was a founding member of the Propel by Deloitte team, the cloud-first accounting team for startups and high growth businesses. Andy was responsible for growing the team to fifty and driving revenue from zero to £4m over a 24 month period.

As part of his time working with Startups, Andy spent three months in California to better understand the complexity of VC finance and Silicon Valley before returning to the UK. It was this period that inspired him to found Honest Mobile with a School Friend and the business has been in operation since January 2019.

Reza is conceptualising and delivering transformative emerging technologies (IoT, 5G, Cybersecurity, etc.) at Connected Places Catapult. He has over 13 years of experience of successful delivering R&D and EU projects in industry and academia. He has strong technical skills and experience to ensure strategies, standards, and architectures are consistent and integrated across the domain. Prior to the Catapult, he led technical contributions in several projects in Intel Collaborative Research Institute (ICRI), Imperial College London, BT,  Vodafone, Ericsson and Tohoku University. He gained his PhD from King's College London.

Mohammed Al-Imari obtained his Ph.D. degree in mobile communications from the University of Surrey, U.K., in 2013. He worked as Research Fellow at the 5G Inovation Centre where he focused on developing advance multiple access technologies for 5G systems. In 2015, he joined Samsung R&D Institute UK as a 5G Research Engineer, where he actively lead and contributed to the Horizon 2020 5G-PPP projects including FANTASTIC-5G and ONE5G.

Since 2017, he is working with MediaTek as Radio Standardization Specialist, where his main focus is on developing 3GPP specifications for 5G.

He has filed more than 30 patents, published over 40 referred journals and international conference papers, and made active contributions to PHY standardization of 5G (NR).

Tom is a highly experienced, committed and enthusiastic consultant with 25 years’ experience, who thrives on creating and running high performance teams and personally developing and delivering strategies that make a real difference.

Tom’s experienced includes working in Africa, Europe, Middle East and Far East. His experience is hands on and cutting edge having spent four years as the Group COO for Smile Telecoms, playing a pivotal role in the strategic planning, fund raising and the “Hands-On” building of the network and operations of Smile’s 4G LTE start-ups in Africa.

Tom believes strongly that great leadership and innovation is a fundamental key for success.

David is an urban technology and smart cities specialist, working with cities, governments and startups around the world to develop innovative new solutions to overcome key challenges. 

He currently works as the Head of Urban Connected Communities for the 5G Testbed & Trials team at DCMS, and as Head of Cities for PUBLIC, a GovTech venture firm, leading the successful UrbanChallenge programme. 

Previously he was Director for Data & Demonstrators at the Future Cities Catapult, a UK Government backed innovation centre of excellence, leading a team of data scientists and urban technologists. Before that he led Nesta’s cities work in their Government Innovation department, and before worked on Innovate UK’s £35m Future Cities Demonstrator Programme. He is also a CABE Built Environment Expert for the Design Council, offering his expertise in urban development and renewal. He’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Chartered Engineer with the Royal Academy of Engineer.