A warm welcome to Tom Pecher, who joins us this month to begin his PhD studies, supervised by Prof John Cartlidge and Dr Nirav Ajmeri. Tom received a first-class MComp in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Bath. His previous research spans reinforcement learning, natural language processing, multi-agent adversarial debate, and sparse large language model fine-tuning, with a particular interest in AI safety and interpretability. Tom’s PhD is sponsored by the EPSRC AI4CI Hub through its Financial Stability theme, and his research will explore collective dynamics and productive disagreement between financial agents, with applications to LLM reasoning, financial stability benchmarking, and the prediction of financial trends.