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 and has three children. He is the worst sort of Manchester United supporter. Olly is a Non-Executive Director of the Irish 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!
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.
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.
Andy Footner
Drupal Developer
Andy is a big fan of open source projects and is happy to be part of the Torchbox Drupal team. Before the web was such an interesting place to be, he found various other ways to put his Philosophy degree to good use, including editing the Time Out guide to Rio and their monthly magazine in Istanbul, writing articles on news and culture, organising off-beat musical events and producing a documentary with his Argentinian wife.
Johan Gant
Senior Drupal Developer
Johan joined Torchbox in 2011 from GTI Media where he worked with technologies ranging from .NET to Drupal and Python. With a degree in Computing and Philosophy from the University of Kent, Johan brings a wealth of experience to the Drupal team and is a firm believer in giving users as much control and ownership of their web products as possible. Outside of work and geeky blogs Johan's interests include tropical fish keeping and strange coffees. Johan would love to spend more time SCUBA diving.
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.
Jonny Grum
Digital Marketing Manager
Originally from Rugby, Jonny studied English in Sheffield before graduating in 2009. An internship with the digital team at Molson Coors gave him the digital marketing bug. After first tracking the success of the iPint, he then went on to work primarily with the Carling and Coors Light brands. Jonny now works with Torchbox clients to make their content famous. He is currently in the IAB's Rising Voice in Social Media initiative and loves to talk about social media, football, scandinavian disco and his foray into learning Japanese.
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.
Dr.Stewart Houten
Systems Administrator
It all started for Stewart, at the tender age of 9, with the ZX81. Since then he's found time to follow his Maths degree with a PhD in Computational Fluid Dynamics and 6 years of Linux development with a NERC research group. When not patching and optimising our development and production environments, Stewart renovates his house, plays tournament Scrabble and strums a mean Bluegrass mandolin.
Edward Kay
Head of Production
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.
Neil Lyons
Developer
Originally from Belfast, Neil studied Informatics at the University of Manchester and worked as a Drupal developer after graduation. More recently Neil has focused on rapid custom application development, leading to his joining the Torchbox tech team as a Django developer. Outside of work a few of Neil's favourite things include going to gigs and comedy nights.
Pete Martin
Digital Marketing Executive
Pete studied English and American Literature at the University of Kent before moving on to an MA in Museums & Galleries. After a few years building up a reputation within social media circles in the culture sector, Pete joined Torchbox in 2011 to work with our growing digital marketing team.
James Morris
Drupal Developer
Graduating with a degree in Web Computing, James has since extended his skills in front-end development, user experience design, PHP and Drupal. An active participant in the local web community, James has attended several design jams, including co-organising and hosting Design Jam Oxford 2011. Outside of work James enjoys film, food, philosophy, motorsport, keeping fit and travelling - recent highlights include trips to Brazil and Kenya.
Matthew Owen
Project Manager
Matthew spent four years studying Classics and English at St Hugh's College, Oxford before letting his interests in usability, analytics, workflows, and project management run free at Torchbox. In his spare time he plays guitar in a folk-rock band and tries to avoid falling off his motorcycle. When he isn't boring anyone who'll listen to his thoughts about baseball statistics, he's working to rediscover his love of literature.
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.
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.
Joe Wass
Developer
Joe came to Torchbox from Sophos, where he spent the best part of three years working on .NET middleware, the Anti-Virus for Mac GUI and test and build automation. Having tinkered with the web from a young age, he saw the light, swapping C# and Objective-C for Python and JavaScript. He divides his spare time between his folk instruments, at least two of which you won't have heard of. Joe lives in Oxford, on the Thames, in a boat and has only fallen in once.
Alice Watanabe
Project Manager
A graduate of Chelsea College of Art and Central Saint Martins, Alice entered the field as a creative person who moved into web development but discovered her real strength and interests lay in project management. She is an experienced project manager, joining us from Oxford University Press. Outside work she’s a keen cyclist, photographer, and bass player.
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
Search Marketing Executive
Christopher spent the best part of the noughties studying English at Hertford College, Oxford, learning more than is probably sensible about James Joyce. He joined Torchbox as a project manager but has more recently focused on search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising. He is a qualified Google AdWords practitioner. In his spare time he plays the ukulele, drums in a samba band, and referees rugby union and touch.
