Heather Savory

Heather Jane Savory (born 1963) is a British former chair of the Chair of the Open Data User Group. She has been the deputy national statistician and Director General for Data Capability at the Office for National Statistics and worked on Big Data for the United Nations.

Life Savory was born in March 1963. As she grew up she played with Meccano and she decided as a teenager to drop humanities so she could concentrate on maths, physics, chemistry and languages. Everyone else who was studying both maths and physics at her school was a boy. Her qualifications gained her a place at Loughborough University of Technology where she graduated with a first class honours degree in Electronic and Electrical Engineering.

After Loughborough she joined the General Electric Company where she began work designing semi conductors. She was at 3D Labs when they designed their first graphics chip. She remembers the joy as the chip they had designed was manufactured and was then soldered to a printed circuit board. It worked and in 1996 3D labs was floated on NASDAQ and it was bought out by Intel in 2012.

In 2016 Savory began work the United Nations representing the UK Office for National Statistics. This role enables the UN to encourage the exchange of data and methods across the globe.