Siân Thomas

Chief Data Officer at Department for International Trade

Speaker

Beginning her career in the private sector, Sian moved to the Food Standards Agency working in various roles including Social Research, Governance and Ethics and leading the Data, Information Governance and Security team. She led on projects such as predicting norovirus from Twitter data and piloting a blockchain tool to make better use of data about cows at slaughter.

Siân joined DIT in February 2019.

Here she is focused on:

• Building services and products to help DIT staff better understand and meet business and customer needs in a challenging trading environment, and through Covid-19;
• Developing a departmental Data Strategy;
• Leading a data infrastructure team to help the department get more value from its data assets; and
• Creating a data service to allow the UK to implement an independent trade policy for the first time in more than 40 years