As the inventor, the spin-out founder, the licensor, and the executive running a business built on licensed technology. PhD in experimental physics, twenty years moving between the technical work and the commercial calls that sit on top of it.
Granted patents behind Sensability™ Technology, now in Breville's Eye Q toaster range.
A university research spin-out taken through to commercialisation.
Led a business through acquisition, keeping its customers and technology intact.
“A company called Sensability have been developing sensors and algorithms for years and helped with Breville's Eye Q Optic Sensors.”
Tom Groundes-Peace, Senior Global Category Manager & Head of Research, Breville — interviewed in The AU Review
I co-founded Sensability in 2011, alongside two colleagues from the University of Adelaide.
Startups, deep tech, commercialisation. Venture building, technology transfer, taking research to market, and the judgement calls that come with running a deep-tech company.
Hands-on modelling and experimental design: spectroscopy and chemometrics, rigorous ML validation (grouped cross-validation, leakage detection, calibration transfer), and applied statistics — built and shipped as real, field-validated production systems.
Selected technical work
88–94% field-validated accuracy classifying petroleum contamination directly from infrared spectra, across three regulatory thresholds and 2,700+ independently lab-measured samples. Built for Ziltek's RemScan, running on real sites for Chevron and Kuwait Oil Company, and included in a CONCAWE-funded comparative evaluation of field TPH technologies.
Modelled soil organic carbon from spectra across 15,341 real, lab-referenced samples nationally (R²=0.85), externally validated on 350+ samples never seen in training. Taken through to real commercial deployment, including a soil-carbon monitoring program for Chevron and an ACCU Scheme-compliant sampling-strategy design.
Built a compositional-statistics model that treats sand/clay/silt as a single constrained composition, predicting soil texture directly from an infrared scan — developed in partnership with a commercial soil-testing laboratory: 93–94% texture-class accuracy in the field.
Building the physics and validation engine behind Groundswell (in active development): real wave physics, satellite imagery, and computer vision, tested against real ocean buoy networks through a custom reliability gate built to stop an unreplicated result from being trusted.
Caught a model that looked strong under casual cross-validation (R²=0.65) collapse to R²=-2.8 under a properly rigorous, leakage-safe check, then root-caused it to exactly how the physical soil samples were being repacked between scans. Reporting that a model doesn't work yet, and exactly why, is the same discipline that makes the ones that ship trustworthy.
Know your number before you negotiate.
Salary benchmarks built entirely from real U.S. government wage data: DOL filings and BLS survey data.
groundworkpay.com ↗
Find the best surf around you.
Surf forecasts for any GPS point on Earth, built from open wave and satellite data and sharpened with machine learning trained on real surf-cam footage.
Selected past work
Infrared spectroscopy for real-time soil and contamination analysis.
Joined in 2018 as Chief Science Officer, CEO from 2021. Led the company through acquisition by GXLab (formerly FarmLab) in 2025, keeping its customers and technology intact.
ziltek.com ↗
Optical sensors for consumer appliances.
Co-founded in 2011 alongside two University of Adelaide colleagues. The underlying patents are now licensed into Breville's Eye Q toaster range.
Read the interview ↗I like taking something out of a lab and finding out whether it actually works as a business. Twenty years in, I've stayed close to the technical work even while taking on commercial and leadership roles. These days that means building my own software products alongside consulting work.
Delivering, commissioning, and meeting customers and partners in person.
Plus nationwide work across Australia, from state capitals to rural regional centres.
15 granted patents (3 patent families, each granted in Australia, the US, Europe, China, and Russia). 15 peer-reviewed publications, with 356 total citations (Google Scholar, September 2026).