Sean started his professional career as an engineer, completing double Bachelor degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Physics at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His first job after graduating was working in the maintenance department at a large aluminium smelter, which was enough to turn him off engineering for life. After flitting around Europe for a year he returned to Australia to undertake a PhD in Astrophysics at the Australian Defence Force Academy, with the idea of pursuing a career in Europe as a rocket scientist. While he made it back to Europe, the rocket science dream never really materialised. He did, however, end up working for the European Space Agency as a research scientist with the XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope team, first in France and later in England. During this period his research was focussed on hunting for rare types of collapsed stars such as white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. In 2009 he led the team that discovered the best known candidate for a new class of intermediate mass black holes. In 2010 he returned to Australia to take up a research fellowship at the University of Sydney where he continued his black hole hunting, before leaving academia in 2014 to start a new career in the burgeoning field of data science. He has worked for various federal government departments including Defence, Home Affairs and Health, as well as large (Teradata) and small (Gameface.ai, Receptiviti) commercial organisations. His work has spanned diverse areas including national security, law enforcement, utilities, health, politics and professional sport. His expertise covers machine learning, natural language processing, graph/network analytics and computer vision. His most recent role was leading the data science activities at Receptiviti, a Canadian based technology startup working in the novel field of language psychology. He currently lives in Newcastle, Australia, with his wife Heidi and fur-baby Leeloo.​