Tom Dyson
Technical Director
Tom graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1995, swapping the later philosophy of Wittgenstein for Netscape 2 and a 9600 baud modem. He started Torchbox with Olly in 2000; since then he has been responsible for the technical direction of all our major developments. Tom's interests include natural language processing, Python, carbon measurement, CouchDB, mini web servers and Jabber. He composed the theme tune to Charlie and Lola.
Olly Willans
Creative Director
Olly is a Founder Director and the Creative Director at Torchbox. His job is to help our clients achieve fantastic things online. He leads the design, digital strategy, user experience, and information architecture at Torchbox. He likes camping, mountains and herding sheep, but has recently been spending his time renovating a house in the flattest part of Oxfordshire. Olly is married to Firoozeh and has three children, Savannah, Jasmine and Sacha (a boy). He is the worst sort of Manchester United supporter. Olly is a Non-Executive Director of the charity Valid Nutrition.
Ian Bellchambers
Business Development Director
Ian oversees our sales and marketing activities and ensures a seamless transition for new clients from the cut and thrust of competitive tendering to the serious business of actually getting some work done. An enthusiast for most things beginning with the word "open" and an inveterate collector of market intelligence and internet news, there's little that Ian doesn't have an opinion on and what's left is almost certainly not worth bothering with.
Rob Salmon
Director of Digital Marketing
Having worked in online marketing since 1998, Rob is our digital marketing specialist.
Rob loves to wax lyrical about the merits of creating compelling content and making that content famous.
This is what he aimed for with the award winning Carling programme that he led at Molson Coors where he worked on 'iPint' - one of the UK's most popular iPhone apps.
Rob sits on the IAB's Social Media Council and until recently was Chair of ISBA's Digital Action Group.
If you fancy a curry, a pint, a good natter about football and a sing song, then head to Rob's house!
David Tomlinson
Technical Director
David comes to us from a London agency. There, his teams built platforms and developed systems to deliver corporate applications for FTSE 100 companies. He has swapped that, and a long commute, to look after the technical, Fast Trac and System Administration teams here at Torchbox. Although he knows better than to play in a sprawling rock band, this doesn't appear to stop him. He lives locally with his wife Fi, and his three children, Edith, Esme and Arthur.
James Webster
Technical Operations Director
James joined Torchbox early in 2008 after almost nine years with Amazon.co.uk as a senior software development manager. James fulfills a dual role; masterminding internal production, and acting as a technical consultant on large projects. James brings his experience of building scalable software, large scale system integration, and managing high performing teams. He is a big fan of the Scrum development methodology and Agile development in general.
Victoria Chan
Developer
Victoria is a twittering, blogging, flickring, brompton riding, dim sum loving, mac convert developer from Singapore, who has been critically involved in many of Torchbox's best projects over the last few years.
Helen Chapman
Project Manager
Helen studied English at university, but discovered her inner geek via a postgraduate course in Cartography. Before joining Torchbox in 2004 she worked variously as a cartographer, a web developer and a programmer on an ESA project. Her role covers development and project management: clients she has managed new sites for include WWF and Rethink. Outside work her main job is being a mummy, but she also enjoys reading, growing organic veg and doing the saturday Guardian crossword.
Garrett Coakley
Developer
Garrett has well over a decade's experience in developing for the web. Past clients range from national high street retailers and financial institutions to international charities and NGOs. His specialisms include Drupal development and community building. Garrett spent four years as an administrative member of the evolt.org web collective and is currently an administrator of the Oxford Flickr group. A keen amateur photographer and guitarist he stands 5' 9" in his socks and has a curious affinity for Guinness.
David Cranwell
Developer
Dave is part of the Fast Track Projects development team and is a RationalMedia Architect. Since joining Torchbox in 2001, Dave has gained a comprehensive knowledge of charity sector standards and requirements, particularly semantic markup, accessibility and the need for community building systems for outreach and support. Dave is a Coldfusion and PHP developer and is Torchbox's CSS Tzar. He is a keen designer and multimedia aficionado to boot.
Sally Edgington
Project Manager
Sally joined Torchbox in 2002 and has worked as a Project Manager for clients including NDCS, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and Breakthrough. Sally is currently a member of our special Small Projects team, delivering a rapid turnaround for clients in a hurry. Sally has also made a number of positive life changes during her time with Torchbox, include getting married, starting a family and studying for the NCT Ante Natal Teaching Diploma. Growing her own organic vegetables in an allotment is the next challenge.
Ben Enright
Designer
Ben has been at Torchbox since 2004. He is handy with Photoshop and has produced appealing designs for the likes of Asthma UK, Breakthrough Breast Cancer and The King's Fund. To relax Ben enjoys cooking (especially outdoors). He likes chillies, cardamoms and flowery ales. He hates Werthers Originals. He also loves sandwiches and struggles to put them down.
Paul Gill
Account Director
Paul graduated from The Queen's College, Oxford in 1995 with a degree in Zoology which prepared him well for the early dot com boom years with GT and Emap. Returning back to the digital space a couple of years ago, he is a lover of user-centred design and social media, and has plenty of experience on big projects. Whilst not working or kitesurfing he grows prize-winning organic veg and drinks copious amounts of tea.
Bryan Gullan
Senior Project Manager
Bryan is a PRINCE2 Registered Practitioner, currently project managing our work for a range of clients including the University of Oxford, Asthma UK, and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. He earned his Master of Physics (MPhys) degree at Exeter College, Oxford. Bryan's technical background means that he can marry an understanding of the needs of the client with the issues facing the development team, and offer appropriate solutions. Bryan is also Torchbox's accessibility lead and a keen advocate of web standards.
David Harris
Project Manager
David studied Architectural Engineering at Cardiff University, joining Torchbox after gaining experience in editorial project management and marketing. He worked as project manager on the redesign of the International Committee of the Red Cross website, and now focuses on WRAP's corporate website and consumer-facing campaigns. His skiing style has earned him the nickname Serpent. David enjoys playing guitar and drums, and dreams about building himself a cabin in the woods.
Susan Harrison
Administrator
Susan is our Administrator and has been with Torchbox on and off since 2001. As well as looking after our invoicing, accounts and payroll and all that other essential stuff, Susan also makes sure we all have comfortable chairs and that the coffee, biscuits and fruit never run out.
Edward Kay
Senior Project Manager
Edward's skills cover all aspects of the web development project lifecycle. He joined Torchbox in 2008 from SMI-LabHut where he single-handedly designed and built LabHut.com. Edward has a first-class masters degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Bristol and complements his project management nous with solid PHP/MySQL development experience and a compendious knowledge of SEO and internet marketing.
Nick Lee
Designer
Nick has been with Torchbox since 2003. His primary job is to make pretty things in Photoshop, although he occasionally dabbles in a bit of code. When not fiddling with photos and grids, Nick enjoys mountain biking, surfing and snowboarding.
Rich Middleditch
Developer
Rich arrived at Torchbox from an agency in Edinburgh where he worked with clients in the health, education and energy sectors.
A veteran Drupal developer, Rich thrives on solving complex requirements; he loves a bit of integration, and eats migrations for breakfast.
In what passes for spare time, he turns his hand to tinkering with anything mechanical, enjoys kiting and collects antique cameras.
Martin Smith
Systems Administrator
Martin joined Torchbox after graduating in Computer Science form St John's College, Oxford. His passion for Linux and other open source software make him well suited to keeping the Torchbox servers in tip-top condition. When he's not sitting in front of a monitor, Martin enjoys cycling and reading road atlases.
Dr.JP Stacey
Drupal Architect
J-P Stacey graduated from Wadham College, Oxford with a DPhil in atomic and laser physics. After a stint in scientific publishing, he moved on to a senior development role at Torchbox, employing a wide range of technologies including Drupal and Django. In his spare time he organizes Oxford Geek Nights, cycles around the Cotswolds, collects new music and tries his hand at fiction writing. If pressed, he could probably remember how to build a laser, which he admits could come in handy some days.
Dr.Neal Todd
Senior Developer
Following a PhD in Astrophysics Neal worked with the European Space Agency before joining Torchbox in 2001. He has specified, architecturally designed and coded many mission-critical online applications in a variety of languages. Neal is the lead developer of Slivers-of-Time; a Java Servlet-based online marketplace where anyone can sell spare hours, on their own terms, to multiple employers.
Ben Walker
Freelance Developer
Ben graduated from Oxford in Music and spent six years working as a freelance composer and web developer before joining Torchbox in 2008 as a Project Manager and Developer. He loves systematically crafting beautiful websites with CSS, and is happy to dip occasionally into Javascript and PHP. Ben also incessantly writes and records songs, and is addicted to social media.
Dr.Helen Warren
Senior Developer
After gaining a D.Phil in Astrophysics from St. John's College, Oxford, Helen spent several years as an academic researcher in theoretical and observational cosmology, gaining an international reputation. Since joining Torchbox at its inception Helen's work as a Senior Developer has marshalled important projects from concept and specifications through technical build and UAT to training and launch. Outside work Helen has a strong interest in sustainable living and community building.
Wes West
Designer
Wes comes from a background in film-making and animation and spent several years working on commercials and music videos in Soho. He also enjoys walking, frisbee and music. His favourite Beach Boy is Brian.
Matthew Westcott
Senior Developer
Matthew joined Torchbox in 2002 after graduating in Computation from Oriel College, Oxford; he caught the programming bug at an early age on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. He's equally at home architecting large-scale systems using Ruby on Rails or on the front-end side building rich user interfaces with Javascript. Matthew is a regular speaker at conferences and blogs at matt.west.co.tt. He continues to follow new developments in the web world and beyond, although he still fires up the Spectrum every now and then.
Christopher Whalen
Graduate Project Manager
Christopher spent the best part of the noughties studying English at Hertford College, Oxford. He knows more than is probably sensible about James Joyce and is a master of Joycean charades (best played late at night in a public piazza). With previous experience in WordPress and Mambo, at Torchbox his inner geek is at last being allowed to flourish. He is currently training to become a Rising Voice in social media at the Internet Advertising Bureau. In his spare time he plays the ukulele, drums in a samba band, and referees rugby union and touch.
