Gordon Tveito-Duncan receives the Excellence in STEM Achievement Award 2024

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

Gordon Tveito-Duncan is the winner of this year's Excellence in STEM Achievement Award.

He is the CEO and Co-Founder of GaiaLens, an AI-powered sustainability analytics platform for the financial services industry, and is an experienced financial analyst ,having worked as an Equity Research Analyst at an investment bank covering the Technology sector. He also has experience as a Data Science consultant.

He holds a MSc (Distinction) in Data Science from City St George's, University of London, and a BSc (Hons) degree in Economics from the University of Warwick.

In a wide-ranging interview, Gordon shared his experiences of studying at City St George's, his insights into the field of data science and what has helped him excel in his career to date.

I liked the look of the MSc Data Science course at City St George's. It looked like a good all-round course which would give me a great grounding in Data Science. The mixture of theory and practical application through coding really appealed to me.

The highlights included learning the fundamentals of Data Science such as in the machine learning module. I also enjoyed becoming a much better python programmer.

The main challenge was COVID which affected my second term, March 2020. It was a real shame, since all the students were getting to know each other better and then we went into lockdown halfway through the term. This also negatively impacted our learning for the remainder of the course.

Completing the MSc Data Science and achieving a Distinction helped my confidence in starting a FinTech business. It gave me the data science knowledge and coding skills needed to build the prototype of our product. It also gave me credibility when hiring and communicating with tech people.

My career highlight in the field of data science has been starting GaiaLens, an AI-powered sustainability analytics platform for institutional investors and financial services companies. Our platform is data-driven, transparent, and delivers real-time analysis. Our sustainability analytics platform is one of the most technologically advanced in the market, based upon our company coverage (20,000+ listed companies and 3.5 million private companies), the customisability of our platform and our application of AI throughout the product.

We have been featured in many prestigious publications such as Forbes, Money Marketing, Pensions Expert, Institutional Investor, ESG Investor, ESG Clarity and The Australian. Please see our News & Insights page, for all of our thought leadership and press content.

“We have won several awards including: GRC Outlook Magazine - Top 10 ESG Solution Providers 2024; Catapult FundTech 360° Program 2024 – Finalist; Global Financial Innovation Network (GFIN) Greenwashing TechSprint - won two awards, ‘Fast Solution’ and the ‘Globetrotting Solution’; FinTech Global's ESGFinTech100 2023 - The world’s most innovative ESG tech companies that every financial institution needs to know about in 2023.

The MSc Data Science course, run by the Department of Computer Science, gave me a great start in my journey to become an accomplished technologist. With the guidance of the teaching staff, I was able to successfully complete the course which gave me the launchpad to start GaiaLens. I would also recommend the campus and I really liked the location in London that the campus is in.

The MSc Data Science course, run by the Department of Computer Science, gave me a great start in my journey to become an accomplished technologist. With the guidance of the teaching staff, I was able to successfully complete the course which gave me the launchpad to start GaiaLens. I would also recommend the campus and I really liked the location in London that the campus is in.

Being honest I don’t know, I have not looked at the latest figures and reports. I would still assume that the gender balance is very unequal in STEM and so I would say that we should find ways to encourage more women to do STEM subjects and go into technology. From an employer perspective, when we are hiring tech people, the applicants are overwhelmingly male.