My CDT Journey: James Patrick-Evans

Prior to joining the CDT, I was finishing my Masters in Electronic Engineering and working at an industry placement one day per week. The short time I had working in industry was great fun. I’d met lots of interesting people and found a great team of exceptional colleagues to co-develop my skills with.

My decision to apply and join the CDT programme was based on the amazing opportunities it provided. A funded venture, to peruse my own research ideas and collaborate with a cohort of world-class researchers with similar interests was too big of an opportunity to miss.
Whilst my industry work was interesting and deepened my skillset, it was mainly applied work. I re-used components developed by other people and glued them together to create new applications. It was fast-paced and exciting, but never completely novel. I had a passion to give back to the open-source community and create something original for myself.

The CDT structure allowed me to spend the first year exploring many avenues of research, and liaise with experts in fields I didn’t necessarily know I was interested in. It gave me the opportunity to join summer schools and attend conferences from all over the world; something which I will be forever grateful for. During my time in the CDT, I met and discussed problems with the world-leading experts in my field. I talked to aspiring PhD students from other Universities about their latest challenges and how we both had attempted to solve them. Collaboration with industry partners brought real-world insights into unique problems they faced that were difficult to solve.

The CDT was also forthcoming in its industry connections; I would not have applied or worked for Mozilla if it wasn’t for an internal Royal Holloway email. It unlocked doors to industry placements, in which I found myself defending the UK against live malicious botnets and developing zero-day exploits against them. Furthermore, I would not have known to apply for my latest venture with Conception X or the NCSC-backed Cyber Runway. Without a shadow of a doubt, it is clear that I would not be where I am today without the CDT. 

Since leaving the CDT, I decided to found a start-up called RevEng.ai, a company dedicated to building artificial intelligence for proactive cyber defence. We are working to provide a solution to an obvious problem in the industry today; the number and cost of cyber-attacks keep rising year on year. In 2021, global firms lost $4.75T to cyber-attacks. Organisations are responding, but the fastest growing type of breaches are software supply chain attacks, which may be almost impossible to defend against. We believe we have the first technical solution to the software supply chain problem that even the NSA became a victim of with SolarWinds.

James Patrick-Evans

root@reveng.ai

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