Dr Laura Gilbert

Dr Laura Gilbert is Senior Director of AI at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, where she leads the AI Innovation Lab, working with governments worldwide to harness AI for more effective public services and better outcomes for citizens. She is also a Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics School of Public Policy and a Visiting Fellow in AI at Hertford College, Oxford.

From September 2020 to January 2025, Laura worked in 10 Downing Street as the founding director of 10DS, the government’s data science team, and the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI). Her teams delivered rapid, high-impact modelling and analysis to support policy decisions, while pioneering AI solutions for public services. She was awarded a CBE for Services to Technology and Analysis in the New Year’s Honours 2024.

Laura holds a doctorate in Particle Physics from the University of Oxford and undergraduate degrees from the University of Cambridge. She is a Fellow of both the Institute of Physics and the Institute of Analytics, and is fluent in seven programming languages.

Before government, Laura spent a decade as CTO of Rescon, a medical technologies company she helped build from startup to acquisition. Her work spanned wearable technology, systems architecture, and data security and she was named on four patents. Earlier in her career, she worked in quantitative finance and defence intelligence. Outside work, Laura has represented Great Britain seven times in Savate kickboxing.