Professor Anne Trefethen is Professor of Scientific Computing at the University of Oxford and a Trustee of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK's national institute for artificial intelligence and data science. She describes herself as "a geek at heart", having built her career on algorithms and high-performance computing, from early work on parallel algorithms with Thinking Machines, one of the first companies to sell massively parallel machines, through research programmes with EPSRC and UKRI.

At Oxford, she founded and directed the university's e-Research Centre for almost seven years before becoming its first Chief Information Officer, leading the creation of a single central IT department and the cyber security capability that came with it. She went on to serve successively as Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Gardens, Libraries and Museums, for People, and finally for Digital, in which role she led Oxford's digital transformation strategy through the arrival of generative AI. That strategy was published in 2022, just weeks before ChatGPT appeared, forcing a rapid rethink of planned investments and a new emphasis on governance.

As a trustee of the Alan Turing Institute, her current focus is on national resilience in an AI-driven world: sovereign capability, models that can be trusted because their training data is known, and ensuring enough people are trained to use these tools well.