Andy is ieso’s Chief Science & Strategy Officer. He steers our global science and technology strategy, ensuring it chimes with our commercial vision.

His varied scientific career splits into complementary thirds. In the first, within academia, at the universities of St Andrews and Cambridge, he focussed on how the brain works and how conditions occur. Next, as CSO of Cambridge Cognition, he explored drug-based therapeutics. Finally, as CSO here at ieso, he has investigated how the words exchanged between two people can best treat common mental health conditions. It is this unrivalled breadth of knowledge that makes him uniquely well placed to identify the breakthroughs that will defeat mental illness.

For the next chapter, his eye here at ieso is squarely fixed on digital therapy and the breakthroughs that data science is going to enable.

Andy’s aim has always been to help the largest volume of people. And the software-based digital therapeutics ieso is developing looks set to be even more scalable than the mental telehealth it was instrumental in pioneering.

“I firmly contend that data science is going to tell us more about the brain than all of the biological sciences combined. Physical healthcare benefits from relevant data being readily translated into numbers. The difficulty mental healthcare has faced has been turning language into numbers that can be measured and dosed. By hiring a team of Natural Language Processing data scientists we’re overcoming that challenge at last.

“My first analysis of outcomes at ieso – over a decade ago – revealed a recovery rate of 38%. This same rate is now close to 70% – an industry-leading figure. Our online CBT – done smarter thanks to deep learning insights from our cutting-edge data science team – is now almost twice as effective. That makes me extremely proud and very confident in our ability to produce pivotal breakthroughs.”