Meet the Team: Gordon McKenzie, Clincial Lead
Gordon McKenzie joined the Upstream Health team earlier this year as the Clinical Lead.
His role is to drive Upstream Health forward towards maximum clinical impact while maintaining high standards of clinical safety.
Gordon is also a super talented full stack developer with a creative streak and he's fitted right into our team of techies, entrepreneurs and creatives.
We caught up with Gordon to find out more about him and welcome him to the Upstream family.
Hi Gordon, what do you get up to on a day-to-day basis at Upstream?
I work closely with Upstream Founder Darren Crombie, offering everything from clinical opinion about product features through to evaluation of supervised machine learning models.
I also help to develop and approve Clinical Risk Management Plans.
What are your hobbies and interests outside of work?
I have a nine-month-old son - Max - who keeps me extremely busy, so I spend most of my time with him and my wife, Danielle. Otherwise, I like to be creative; I cook, travel, write, paint and do a bit of DIY.
It sounds like you're very busy then! What did you do before joining us at Upstream?
Alongside Upstream, I work at Hull York Medical School, where I am a Doctoral Research Fellow undertaking a PhD in Geriatric Oncology and Specialist Registrar in Ear, Nose and Throat Surgery at Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
I started coming along to events at C4DI (Hull's Centre For Digital Innovation) - where Upstream is based - last year and met Darren through the regular developer meetup CodePen. I wanted to gain more experience working within an agile technology environment, so it was a no-brainer when Darren invited me to join Upstream formerly.
What excites you the most about being part of the team?
Things move so fast at Upstream and there's a real can-do attitude. For example, I suggested the use of a particular supervised machine learning API one day and my colleague and Upstream Development Lead Jack Ford integrated it into one of our products a few days later.
Darren has a wealth of experience in health technology and Jack's work programming microelectronics with C/C++ for one of our products is fantastic engineering.
The collaboration with others in the C4DI building - such as Hayden Barton and Sauce - is inspiring and I hope to get more involved with some of the engineering side of things.
I love learning new things and, through working at Upstream, I get to learn about startups, businesses IoT, microelectronics, software, hardware, agile and lean - the list is endless.
We're thrilled to be a Microsoft Partner and receive the fantastic awards we have recently - it will all help us to further develop our latest product into a game-changing, socially good product using cutting-edge AI.