Mike Hudson receives the Distinguished Professional STEM Alumni Award 2024

On 17 September 2024, City St George’s School of Science & Technology will honour three of its most outstanding alumni at its third, annual STEM Alumni Awards ceremony.

This year, Mike Hudson (BSc in Systems and Management Science, 1987) will receive The Distinguished Professional STEM Alumni Award.

Mike Hudson runs the Mike Hudson Foundation, which donates AI to support nonprofits. He is a tech entrepreneur and philanthropist based in London.

In early 2020 there were no vaccines for COVID-19. WHO declared that every country should "Test, Test, Test." The UK's then health secretary, Matt Hancock, called upon British labs to increase PCR testing capacity.

My partner, a primary care physician, was working in a front-line COVID-19 centre, whilst I was at home frustrated at being unable to contribute to the crisis. I began to wonder whether I could use my electronic marketplace experience to help increase the UK’s capacity of COVID-19 PCR testing.

Demand for PCR capacity grew dramatically throughout the pandemic until vaccines began to take effect. In the commercial sector, demand increased sharply when PCR testing was mandated for screening international travellers and pinpointing new virus strains.
In the pandemic's initial phase, I observed that some of the UK’s PCR lab facilities were isolated, and not fully utilised.

Having seen similar challenges in the financial sector, I wondered whether establishing a marketplace platform to bridge the gap between labs and healthcare entities could help to maximize COVID-19 PCR testing. This idea became TestRAMP. We reached out to as many labs as possible, identifying those already proficient in PCR and assisting other labs to get involved.

After TestRAMP, we’ve focused mainly on setting up my foundation. Mike Hudson Foundation (MHF) is my charitable scientific research fund. We donate money & AI resources to support scientific research, including into climate change and biodiversity. MHF also advises on AI & marketplaces as powerful tools for solving social problems, and helps nonprofits to collaborate.

MHF is a donor advised fund operating under the auspices of Prism the Gift Fund, registered charity no. 1099682. We’re very grateful to Prism; they provide extremely effective administration of our giving to the organisations we support, which include ZSL conservation and Alzheimer's Society.

Although TestRAMP was a genetic/genomic marketplace – which was very new to me - the underlying principles were the same as those of financial marketplaces I have built in the past. What was very different was the motivation, and the effect that had on me.

It was enormously satisfying to get up every day and run something successful that was entirely non-profit, and doing a little bit to help during the pandemic. Recently I’ve gone even further outside my comfort zone. Protecting biodiversity and supporting conservation are two of my passions and as well as supporting ZSL conservation financially, I’m now Adviser to their CEO on innovation. Who knows where that will lead!

That’s a timely question! Until recently I would have said there hadn’t been much connection. My final year project was a derivatives modelling decision support system, but other than that I hadn’t seen my degree as particularly relevant. However, I recently re-read Dana Meadows “Thinking in Systems” and realised that, yes, I had actually been thinking in systems all along. Somehow systems thinking must have become embedded in me without my realising it.

It’s hard to remember exactly why. I think what I remember most is the spread; Systems and Management at that time was an extremely broad degree course, ranging from Peter Checkland’s Soft System Methodology and international relations, to economics and investment decision analysis. I think it gave us tools to get our heads around different types of questions quite quickly.

My first-year room in Northampton Hall of residence, in Bunhill Row. Long demolished, and no great loss to architecture. But the views of London from the 16th floor were fabulous, and very reasonably priced!

Work hard, be nice and realise when you’ve been lucky.