Head of Public Policy, The Open Data Institute (ODI)

Policy Fellow of the Centre for Science and Policy

Dr Mahlet (Milly) Zimeta is Head of Public Policy at the Open Data Institute.

Prior to joining the ODI, she was Senior Policy Advisor at the Royal Society, the independent scientific academy of the UK, where she led the Society’s policy programme on Data and Digital Disruption including projects on data governance, data science skills, and privacy enhancing technologies.

Milly was previously Programme Manager at the Alan Turing Institute, Britain’s national institute for data science and AI, where she managed the Turing’s research partnership programmes with industry and civil society in Health and in Finance/Economic Data Science.

She has also worked at the Medical Research Council, reporting to the Chief Science officer, at the National Institute for Health Research, managing their, policy research portfolio, and served on an Advisory Group at Chatham House. She studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford and was awarded an MPhil in Philosophy from Cambridge and a PhD in Philosophy from York (UK).

As a freelance journalist (byline M.G. Zimeta) she specializes in international relations and international development and is currently a grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.