Gavin Chait is an interdisciplinary data scientist, engineer and economist with 11+ years building data-driven products and open data infrastructure for governments, multilateral organisations and universities across Africa and Europe. He leads product and research work—currently as Honorary Principal Research Fellow at UCL and through his consultancy Whythawk—delivering applied analytics, interoperable data systems and ETL tools such as Whyqd and the openLocal.uk commercial location time‑series. His background spans enterprise market intelligence at GE Healthcare to open-data platform product management at the Open Knowledge Foundation, combining technical hands-on development (Python, FastAPI, TypeScript, geospatial viz) with policy-facing impact. Gavin’s work often sits at the intersection of public good and markets—improving data collection, release and governance to inform development, public health and urban policy. He’s as comfortable leading technical builds and fundraising as he is mentoring graduate research, and has an engineer’s curiosity tempered by economist-style rigor (and a noted fondness for coffee).
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science at University of Cape Town
Perform schema-to-schema transforms for interoperability and data reuse. Transform messy data into structured schemas using readable, auditable methods.
Contributions:4 PRs, 87 pushes, 4 branches in 1 year 8 months
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Gavin Chait - Honorary Principal Research Fellow at Whythawk