Twice-over founder, now researching the future of later life Dasha is trained in computer science and spent the early commercial-internet years working in software engineering and IT. An MPhil in Information Systems at the London School of Economics, where she studied software-development outsourcing as an emerging industry, led her to build Allied Testing, the first specialist provider of outsourced quality-assurance for major financial institutions in the UK and USA. The company reached a thousand employees by year fourteen, which was when Dasha left. While bringing up her children, Dasha worked on a few non-commercial projects, including a collaboration with Japanese glass artists and a children’s financial-education book, and later founded her second company, Livlet, a smart-home management platform whose AI-powered invoice engine was built before ChatGPT. While at Cambridge, Dasha wants to explore population ageing and how societies can be redesigned to support people in living their later life. This includes care models, government policies, economic research, technological advances, and psychology research – all of it aimed at structuring later life in the most fulfilling way. The field is vast, and Dasha hopes to find an area which is most meaningful to her to concentrate on over the next period of her life.
