Hamish Huggard

Physics Teacher & AI Engineer

hamishhuggard@gmail.com github.com/hamishhuggard +64 21-0261-6118

Physics teacher at Glenfield College, specialising in building science simulations and classroom software.

M.Sc. in Computer Science (awarded Best Thesis) and a conjoint B.Sc. in Physics & Computer Science / B.A. in Philosophy & Mathematics, with three machine learning publications. Before teaching I spent five years as a data scientist and machine learning engineer, working on clinical AI at Orion Health, research tools at Litmaps, and frontier AI evaluations at METR. In between, I spent a year making educational animations — one hit 3 million views and led to a six-figure grant to make more.

Publications

2020 Concept drift detection for medical triage. H. Huggard, Y.S. Koh, G. Dobbie, E. Zhang.
ACM SIGIR.

2019 Feature importance for biomedical named entity recognition. H. Huggard, A. Zhang, E. Zhang, Y.S. Koh.
AI: Advances in Artificial Intelligence.

2018 Predicting air quality from low-cost sensor measurements. H. Huggard, Y.S. Koh, P. Riddle, G. Olivares.
Australasian Conference on Data Mining.

Technical Skills

Teaching: physics & mathematics, interactive simulation design, explanatory animation, technical writing.

AI & ML: Python, PyTorch, LLMs, AI Agents, Claude Code, Cursor, NLP, Scikit-Learn, Pandas.

Web & Viz: JavaScript, HTML, D3.js, React, Plotly, CSS.

Engineering: Git, SQL, Postgres, Docker, Linux, Kubernetes.

Adventures

2026 64km in 6:54South Island Ultra-marathon

2023 280km in 3 weeksCamino de Santiago, Portugal

2021 3,000km in 6 monthsTe Araroa Trail, the length of NZ

Experience

2026-Present Glenfield College Physics Teacher (Trainee) Teaching Year 9 and 10 science and Year 12 and 13 physics full-time.
Built my own software suite for teaching, combining slide decks, lesson plans, calendars, timetables, roll call, flashcards, student progress tracking, and interactive simulations.
Coach the robotics club and help run the adventure club.

2024-2025 Equistamp Research Engineer (Contract) Expert human baseline for benchmarking frontier AI agents on programming and ML tasks, plus QA on model outputs and code for the evaluation suites.

2022-2023 Global Problems Cheatsheet Writer & Animator Spent a year writing and animating an illustrated primer on the world's most pressing problems — global poverty, pandemics, nuclear war, AI, and climate change.

2020-2021 Litmaps Data Scientist Built the interactive research-graph visualizations at the core of the product in React and D3.js, and deployed the company's first production AI features.

2018-2020 Orion Health Data Scientist (Graduate) Developed a novel feature engineering library for biomedical text, improving the F1-score of deep learning models for named entity recognition in clinical notes.

2015-2018 University of Auckland Teaching Assistant Taught physics and computer science labs alongside my undergraduate study.

Education

2018-2020 University of Auckland GPA: 4.0 / 4.0 Master of Science (M.Sc.) Computer Science My external examiner described it as "the best Masters thesis I have seen."
Best M.Sc. Thesis Award, CS Dept (2020) · Precision Driven Health Scholarship (2019)
Postgraduate Honours Scholarship (2017) 2014-2017 University of Auckland GPA: 3.81 / 4.0 Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) Physics & Computer Science (double major) 2014-2017 University of Auckland GPA: 3.81 / 4.0 Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Philosophy & Mathematics (double major) Senior Scholar Award, Faculty of Arts (2017) · Sir Robert Jones Scholarship in Philosophy (2015)