Meet the Team
We have asked the members of the Intellegens team a few questions so that you can get to know them better. Here, we introduce Tom Whitehead, Head of Machine Learning at Intellegens.
1. How long have you been working at Intellegens and what is your position/role?
I joined Intellegens at the beginning of 2018, initially in the shared space at Eagle Labs and then moving through a couple of offices as the team has outgrown each in turn! I have led the development of toolkits to enable our core machine learning technology to be applied to a variety of real-world industrial problems, and also lead our consultancy work, engaging with customers to make sure we get the best results for them we can.
2. What is your favourite part about working at Intellegens?
The variety! We’ve worked on problems at the forefront of drug discovery, materials design, and even printer inks. It’s really exciting when someone manufactures a new material that you’ve helped design (and it works!).
3. What is your career/education background?
I joined Intellegens from my PhD in theoretical physics here at Cambridge – it was a bit of a change in day-to-day work, but the problem solving and communication skills I learnt in the PhD are certainly being made use of at Intellegens.
4. What is something that you think makes Intellegens stand out from other companies?
The way our tools can be applied in so many different fields, joining the domain knowledge of our customers to our expertise in machine learning to achieve great results. As our software is designed to be used by lab scientists as well as computer scientists we get a wide variety of viewpoints to help solve real-world problems.
5. What do you enjoy doing when you are not at work?
I enjoy walking my dog (an excitable black lab/German Shephard cross who many of my colleagues have heard barking in the background to video calls in the past year), playing the piano, and reading anything I can get my hands on; currently I’m reading about Simon Bolivar and a (separate!) book on differential geometry.
