James Westwood

I spent a chunk of my career in Shanghai, where the city's pollution problems were impossible to ignore. I joined PureLiving China, an environmental consultancy measuring and remediating indoor air and water quality, eventually running the sales team and then the wider business. Alongside that work I founded two food and drink businesses, Gusto Fine Foods and Westwood Ales. The thread I have followed ever since started there: the problems I find most interesting sit at the intersection of environment, food, and data.

After Shanghai I worked on TestSharing, a New York food safety testing platform, building the chemical database from scraped sources and the analysis system that translated lab results into consumer reports. Food safety and data, this time on a digital platform.

In late 2019 I joined the Office for National Statistics, first as a contractor and then on staff. Over five and a half years there I worked across economic statistics, crime, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals reporting platform. The thread was the same: real-world problems made legible through data.

I am now a Senior Data Scientist at the Food Standards Agency, building a LangChain agentic system that standardises food safety data from 360 local authorities, and a DistilBERT classifier that automated a 240-class manual triage process the team used to do by hand. My personal projects extend that focus beyond food into the wider environmental SDGs: carbon-aware EV charging, a conditions recommender for South Wales climbing crags, and a few others on the projects page.