I am a Technical Director at Keynetix and have been involved with developing geotechnical applications on a commercial basis at Keynetix for nearly 10 years.

I completed a BEng in Civil Engineering at Queen Mary College, University of London and then completed a PhD in Geotechnical Engineering there under the supervision of Dr William Powrie. My PhD involved writing code of the Geotechnical Finite Element Program CRISP.

On completion of my PhD I worked for SAGE Engineering for 4 years as the product manager for SAGE CRISP. It was at my time at SAGE that I was introduced to the AGS data transfer format (I was trying to get CPT results from a boat in the Philippines via our office in Bath to the Netherlands but that is another story).

In 1997 I joined the AGS Data Transfer working party as the “offshore representative” and have now been serving on this committee for nearly 10 years.

In 1998 I joined Keynetix (Key Systems Geotechnical as it was called then) as a Director. At that time the company was just Mike Rothery and I. Chris Bray joined us shortly afterwards and since this time I have been working hard to build the company up to the 12 strong team we have now.

I co-authored the CIRIA guide to AGS-M with Tim Spink and Mike Black and have been actively involved in the production of AGS 3 and AGS 3.1. In 2004 I headed up the AGSML review group in the AGS committee to review the possibilities of converting the AGS format to XML…. And here I am today.

I have put a lot of my personal (and company) time into DIGGS and believe that it is the best opportunity the international committee has to cooperate in sharing knowledge and work. I get very frustrated when I see other groups working on their own on a “geotechnical transfer format” as 9 times out of 10 they are reinventing the wheel and spending time and money that could be much better used if we all worked together.

Outside of work my time is mainly spent with my two delightful daughters.