The Talent Tap Ambassadors
AJ Reus
Ambassador
AJ works in the European Investment Banking at William Blair, advising private equity clients on cross border M&A transactions. AJ started his career at PwC in London, before spending 3 years in Hong Kong in the M&A team. Outside of work, AJ is a keen sportsman and traveller, combining the two where possible, following England and the British & Irish Lions abroad. AJ was previously a qualified tennis coach, and still plays socially, but focuses on golf and skiing in his spare time. AJ holds a first class degree in Business, Accounting and Finance from Newcastle University.
Jaspar Crawley
Ambassador
Jaspar is Director of Institutional Investment at the World Gold Council, having spent the prior decade sales trading in commodities, mostly financial metals, at UBS and Deutsche Bank. Before finance, Jaspar was a British Army Officer (Queens Royal Hussars) and saw service active in Iraq. Jaspar read History (BA Hons) at Newcastle University.
Professor Tanya Ovenden-Hope PFHEA
Ambassador | ADVISOR
Professor Tanya Ovenden-Hope PFHEA is a committed and enthusiastic educationalist with three decades of cross sector experience (FE, school and HE) in teaching, teacher education and educational leadership. Her commitment to championing the importance of, and developing new ways of thinking about, learning and teaching was recognised when she was awarded Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2014 and the National Enterprise Educator Award in 2014.
The author of over 75 papers, reports, articles and books, Tanya uses her position to raise the profile of educational isolation. Her current research explores the complexity of educational isolation and the effect of this on school experience and improvement for coastal, rural and small schools in England. The findings have included particular issues, which has resulted in further research and development of interventions, such as on early career teacher retention (RETAIN project) and have resulted in her advising the DfE on the Early Career Framework and Teacher Retention and Recruitment Strategy.
Tanya has also used her research findings to inform professional development with teachers and educational leaders (e.g. NEEA, 2014; Social Mobility Commission, 2017, supporting school leaders in Cornwall to consider the challenges of working in a coastal area), as have others (e.g. Ambition School Leadership, 2015; Regional Schools Commission South East and South London 2017, Durrington Research School 2017-18, Education Endowment Foundation 2019 – RETAIN foundation for ECF pilots).
Simon Francis
Ambassador
Simon is a Managing Director and Co-Head of Leveraged Finance at Citibank. He sits on the Capital Markets Executive Committee. He was previously a Managing Director in a similar role at Credit Suisse. Simon has a BA from Cambridge University in economics. He is a passionate believer in Education in the UK and is on the board of trustees for The Aldridge Foundation. He has been involved with The Talent Tap for 6 years.
Rob Easton
Ambassador
Rob Easton is Global Account Director for Amazon Web Services. He joined Amazon in April 2016, managing some of the world’s leading Oil and Gas customers. Rob began his career with a degree in Engineering from Nottingham University, then joining the HP graduate program, learning everything possible about sales and marketing across the IT industry. In 2013, Rob moved to Google to head up the UK&I Cloud business building a solid team partnering with many system integrators and VC investors. In 2015, Rob was brought in by startup DataStax as Vice President of Northern EMEA, leading a successful team over a 15 month period. Outside of work, Rob is a keen golfer & squash player.
