Katherine James is the Head of Data Science at Royal Mail, where she leads a team of 20 data scientists working on a wide variety of projects including forecasting, vehicle route optimization, workload planning and AI for operational managers. Her background is in statistical genetics and she completed a PhD in the genetics of HIV-2 infection at Oxford in 2014. Following a short Post-Doc in Kumamoto in Southern Japan, she returned to the UK and entered industry as a data scientist in the Know Me team at British Airways. She was responsible for building a recommender system for email personalization which went through successful A/B testing and formed the basis for destination personalization to over 4 million customers. She has been at Royal Mail since 2016 and alongside her day job is a passionate advocate for women in Tech, mentoring several early career data scientists and regularly blogging and speaking about how to increase diversity in tech teams at internal and external events.
