Prior to joining HRW, Sam was the head of the Evidence Lab at Amnesty International where he conducted and led on a wide range of open source research for Amnesty International, including the 2021 Webby Award-winning platform “Teargas: An Investigation” and investigative collaborations with several media organisations, including CNN and NHK.

At Amnesty he set up and managed the Digital Verification Corps – a  partnership between six global universities contributing directly to Amnesty’s open source research. The project was awarded international collaboration of the year at the Times Higher Education awards in 2019, and the innovative teaching award from the University of Cambridge in 2021.

Sam is a fellow of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, where he was a research consultant for their Human Rights Big Data and Technology Project. He has been a fellow of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Colombia University and was a founding partner of First Draft News – an organisation established in 2015 to combat harmful misinformation.

Sam is the co-editor of the book ‘Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation, and Accountability’ published by Oxford University Press. He has also published research on the impact of viewing harmful content during open source investigation and the risk of vicarious trauma.

He has an undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge, a post-graduate degree from the University of Leicester, and an MBA from Koç University in Istanbul.