Gavin Chait
Honorary Principal Research Fellow at UCL
Marseille, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolGavin Chait is an interdisciplinary data scientist, engineer and economist with 11+ years building data-driven products and open data infrastructure for governments, multilateral organisations and universities across Africa and Europe. He leads product and research work—currently as Honorary Principal Research Fellow at UCL and through his consultancy Whythawk—delivering applied analytics, interoperable data systems and ETL tools such as Whyqd and the openLocal.uk commercial location time‑series. His background spans enterprise market intelligence at GE Healthcare to open-data platform product management at the Open Knowledge Foundation, combining technical hands-on development (Python, FastAPI, TypeScript, geospatial viz) with policy-facing impact. Gavin’s work often sits at the intersection of public good and markets—improving data collection, release and governance to inform development, public health and urban policy. He’s as comfortable leading technical builds and fundraising as he is mentoring graduate research, and has an engineer’s curiosity tempered by economist-style rigor (and a noted fondness for coffee).
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science at University of Cape Town
Afrikaans, English, French
Stackoverflow
167reputation
10kreached
3answers
8questions
Github Skills (106)
fastapi10
postgresql10
python10
cookiecutter10
shadcn-ui10
openapi10
bulma10
docker-compose10
neo4j10
jwt10
sqlmodel10
typescript10
full-stack10
tailwindcss10
playwright10
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
whythawk/full-stack-fastapi-postgresql
Jul 2021 - Jan 2023
Full stack, modern web application generator. Using FastAPI, PostgreSQL as database, Nuxt3, Docker, automatic HTTPS and more.
Contributions:10 releases, 2 reviews, 26 commits in 1 year 6 months
databasedockerfastapifull-stacknuxt
whythawk/whyqd-hub
Feb 2023 - Sep 2025
Perform schema-to-schema transforms for interoperability and data reuse. Transform messy data into structured schemas using readable, auditable methods.
Contributions:4 PRs, 92 pushes, 4 branches in 2 years 7 months
data-interoperabilitydata-managementdata-sciencedata-wranglingopen-science
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.