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While currently gainfully employed, I'm always open to new horizons. My curriculum vitae follows:

Career path, in reverse

Transpower, Wellington, New Zealand

Since 1998 I have performed a succession of senior roles within Transpower, which is the transmission grid owner and system operator for New Zealand, in both of those business areas. These have included both management and advisor roles. My current role is development manager (acting) with the system operator development, and my previous role was manager investment strategy, with several other senior roles prior. All these roles have included elements of team leadership, project management, internal consultancy and being a champion of improvement. Examples of my responsibilities and achievements include:

• Authoring and explaining many of Transpower’s key submissions to Government, the regulator and the industry on system operations, industry governance and market design.
• Developing, implementing, promulgating and justifying Transpower’s policy on the critical, complex and contentious areas of electricity market design and transmission pricing.
• Managing professional analytical teams, ensuring a cross-functional approach.
• Developing and championing within Transpower and the industry novel new products, taking Transpower from transmission provider to a wider service provider, including ‘grid support contracts’ for demand side response.
• Obtaining regulatory approval for Transpower’s investment program, including the contentious new transmission line through the Waikato, and developing effective working arrangements and processes with the regulator to smooth a confrontational relationship.
• Representing Transpower on key industry working groups.
• Communicating complex ideas simply and in innovative ways to increase corporate, industry and government understanding of technical and economic issues and their interaction.

Ministry of Economic Development, Wellington, New Zealand

From 1994 to 1998 I managed New Zealand’s energy modelling and statistics unit, as part of the Energy Policy Group of the then Ministry of Commerce. In that position, which involved extensive consultation with other government departments, industry and international organisations, my responsibilities and achievements included:

• Leading a team of professional modellers, econometricians and statisticians, as well as managing consultants and contracts.
• Providing qualitative and quantitative advice to government and officials on energy supply, demand, price and emissions status and projections, and their implications for the development of energy and climate change policy.
• Collecting, compiling, analysing and publishing New Zealand’s energy statistics.
• Providing an energy modelling and forecasting service, generating scenarios of future energy supply, demand and prices, and of greenhouse gas emissions.
• Scoping, drafting, implementing and applying electricity and gas regulations.

Ministry of Defence NZ, Wellington, New Zealand

In 1989 I was recruited from Europe to establish and head New Zealand’s defence operational research effort, which was being re-formed after a six-year hiatus. In a period of considerable change in organisational structure and in New Zealand’s strategic and resource environment, my accomplishments included:

• Leading and guiding a team of four operational research analysts and modellers.
• Introducing, promoting and facilitating the use of formal analysis and decision support systems (the use of which was not traditional to New Zealand’s defence forces).
• Leading major force structure reviews, including policy and operational analysis of New Zealand’s land, sea and air capabilities for combat and surveillance, including a far-reaching review of the overall army and navy structures.
• Delivering policy advice through Cabinet papers on force structure and funding.
• Improving the capital acquisition process through the design and oversight of the way in which major projects are prioritised by cost-effectiveness.

NATO's SHAPE Technical Centre, The Hague, The Netherlands

From 1986 to 1989 I was seconded as a senior scientist to the operational research division of NATO's SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) Technical Centre (now C3 Agency). I was responsible for the development and promulgation of Allied Command Europe's land, sea and air ammunition stockpile guidance, which is of considerable operational and financial consequence to member nations. My key achievements were:

• Comprehensively reviewing existing guidance, changing from an input to an output driven approach. This required development of the theory, the design, development and implementation of a sophisticated computer model, and extensive promotion of the approach to senior representatives of many countries.
• Improving the theory of stockpile planning through research and advice on conceptual approaches, and probability and statistical analysis techniques.

Ministry of Defence UK, Fort Halstead, Kent, England

From 1981 to 1986 I was appointed to progressively higher grades of scientific officer in the principal land forces research establishment of the British Ministry of Defence. My key responsibilities and achievements were:

• Technical support of one of Britain's main research wargames, and the conceptual development, research, design and implementation of new models and procedures for it.
• The conduct and oversight of major stochastic simulation studies into the operational effectiveness of alternative future equipment mixes.
• The development, application and analysis of computer simulation models, ranging in complexity from the simple but effective to those of state of the art sophistication.
• Management of scientific staff and software consultants.

St. John's College, Cambridge, England

From 1978 to 1981, I read mathematics, operational research and economics at Cambridge University, achieving a Bachelor of Arts (honours) which led to a Master of Arts. The focus of my academic interest and expertise is on practical applications of scientific and economic methods to support decision making, and in particular:

• Microeconomics of markets, especially electricity markets.
• Operational research, economics and mathematical modelling.
• Probability, stochastic processes and the treatment of uncertainty.

General attributes

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