Paul Watson FREng FBCS CEng PhD is Director of the UK's National Innovation Centre for Data and Professor of Computer Science at Newcastle University. He began his career at Manchester University before moving to industry to design parallel database servers.  Since joining Newcastle University, his research and teaching has focussed on scalable data engineering. Professor Watson is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a Chartered Engineer. He received the 2014 Microsoft Jim Gray eScience Award.