Meet our team
From founders and directors to researchers and academic advisors
Eido core team
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Ben Winkley
CEO AND CO-FOUNDER
Ben is a Co-Founder and CEO of Eido Research. Prior to this, he has seven years’ professional experience: four years working in statistics for the British Civil Service and three years as a monitoring and evaluation freelancer. Having obtained his master’s degree in Official Statistics from Southampton University, his areas of expertise lie in business management and analysis, quantitative research and evaluation methods, statistical analysis, and communication of research data to non-academic audiences.
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Samuel Verbi
CO-FOUNDER AND HEAD OF METHODOLOGY
Samuel is the Co-Founder and Head of Methodology. Prior to this, he has four years of professional experience as a monitoring and evaluation freelancer, and five years of research experience completing his bachelor’s and master’s in sociology. Working with clients in charities, churches, and Christian development organisations around the world, his areas of strength include programme evaluation, research design, spiritual impact measurement, and qualitative methodology.
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Sarah Gray
HEAD OF EVALUATION AND LEARNING
Sarah brings expertise in monitoring, evaluation and learning from over 15 years working in international development and humanitarian policy and programming. This includes work for the UK's Department for International Development and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, international development NGOs and as a research consultant with Brunel University London.
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Phil Sital-Singh
HEAD OF IMPACT STRATEGY
Phil is the Director of Impact Strategy Services at Eido Research, having joined in 2018. Prior to this, he spent a decade leading research and evaluation work within three UK non-profits. Affectionately known as “Impact Phil” for most of his career, Phil has led countless quantitative and qualitative evaluation projects including SROI analyses and a full matched-control comparison study, as well as training others in how to do impact evaluation on the ground.
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Anita Bennett
HEAD OF DELIVERY
Anita Bennett is Head of Delivery at Eido Research, recently joining from the Jubilee Centre thinktank where she was Head of Research. Anita graduated from Cambridge University and has over 10 years’ research experience working for public, private and third sector clients and charities directly.
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Tyler Overton
LEAD RESEARCHER
Tyler is a social researcher with five years’ professional experience with universities, NGOs, churches, and foundations. After graduating from Oxford University with First-Class Honours, he returned to Oxford for an MPhil in Development Studies, and wrote his master’s thesis on Christianity’s influence on environmental stewardship in the work of a NGO in southern Mexico.
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Ashlyn Whaley
LEAD RESEARCHER
Ashlyn is a lead researcher at Eido with 5 years of experience in the international development sector focused on monitoring and evaluation systems, causal analysis, and research methodologies. With a master's in epidemiology and biostatistics, she has a background in statistical modelling, qualitative and quantitative research, and tool development that enables organisations to gauge the short and long term impact of their programming.
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Ben Keenan
LEAD RESEARCHER
Ben has over 10 years’ experience working with UK non-profits. Most recently he worked for the Church of England where he Co-Led on Monitoring and Evaluation for the Church's national funding programmes (totalling £1.2billion). Before that he spent several years at Tearfund advising on M&E and strategy development. He has had the joy of leading multiple evaluations across Asia and has a passion for helping others develop their own understanding of M&E practices so that they can better understand and increase their impact.
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Hannah Shewan
QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
Hannah is a quantitative researcher at Eido. Her expertise include dashboard design, statistics, and quantitative analysis. She has experience working with churches to create databases and dashboards for spiritual leaders of large congregations. Prior to joining Eido, Hannah studied Computer Engineering (EIE) at Imperial College where she specialised in statistical inference and machine learning.
Non-Executive Advisors
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Rev. Dr. Kate Coleman
NON-EXECUTIVE ADVISOR
Kate is the founding director of Next Leadership. She has 35 years of leadership experience in the church, charity, voluntary, and business sectors, and is a mentor and coach to leaders from diverse sectors, backgrounds, and communities.
Kate was the first black woman Baptist minister in the UK and has been recognised as one of the 20 most influential black Christian women leaders in the country. A popular speaker, lecturer and author, Kate has gained a reputation as a pioneer, visionary, and an inspiration to many. She now serves as a strategic advisor who mentors, coaches, and supports leaders and organisations locally, nationally in the UK, and internationally around the globe with a network extending across all sectors and church denominations.
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Grayden Reece-Smith
NON-EXECUTIVE ADVISOR
Grayden works in finance in London. He is passionate about helping Christians make their lives more impactful and is ambitious about the ability of altruists to solve some of humanity's biggest problems. Grayden is also a Trustee of International Care Ministries UK, Christians for Impact and Effective Altruism UK
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Paul Twelftree
NON-EXECUTIVE ADVISOR
Paul has worked in senior leadership across not for profit and commercial businesses, in startups and for global brands focusing on their vision, strategy, scale, innovation and technology. He is passionate about empowering people and teams to be the best that they can be and the continued success for all involved in a venture.
As an advisor to Eido, his experience in consulting, M&A and partnerships plus his data-driven and pragmatic approach to seeing results have already shaped our thinking for our next chapter.
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Charlie Arbuthnott
NON-EXECUTIVE ADVISOR CHAIR
Charlie worked in investment banking for 30 years for SG Warburg, Hambros and Royal Bank of Canada. Now as a consultant, he advised housing associations on both their finance and their community impact. This work led to a project in Wandsworth, carried out by Eido Research, to create a network, drawing together faith based volunteer groups, the NHS, the police and the Council.
From 2019-21, Charlie chaired the Archbishops’ Commission on Housing, Church and Community - drawing together the housing and development industry, the social housing sector and the church.
Charlie chaired the strategy team for Chanctonbury Churches for six years, ensuring that the vision of the church was worked out in practice across the parish.
Academic advisors
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Professor David Voas
ACADEMIC ADVISOR
Professor David Voas is recognised as a leading quantitative social scientist, an influential sociologist of religion, and the country’s foremost scholar in the quantitative study of religion.
He is currently Professor of Social Science and Head of the Department of Social Science at the UCL Institute of Education. He has published extensively on research methodology within contemporary Christianity, as well leading the research for the Church Growth Report for the Church of England.
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Dr Stephen Backhouse
ACADEMIC ADVISOR
Dr Stephen Backhouse is the Director of Tent Theology, and the Lecturer in Social and Political Theology at St Mellitus College.
Stephen studied at the University of Oxford, then McGill, then Oxford again, where he completed his doctorate on Kierkegaard and religious nationalism. Besides teaching at those universities, Stephen has also written on matters of politics, national identity, and Christianity. Publications include ‘The Compact Guide to Christian History‘ (Lion, 2011), ‘Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism‘ (OUP, 2011) and the biography ‘Kierkegaard: A Single Life’ (Zondervan: 2016).
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Peter Grant
ACADEMIC ADVISOR
Peter has over 30 years of experience in government, NGOs and the private sector as an economist, senior manager and evaluator. As International Director in DFID, he was responsible for the development aspects of the UK’s multilateral partnerships (including the World Bank, EU and UN), and for DFID’s trade, conflict and humanitarian work. Immediately prior to joining Agulhas, Peter was International Director of Tearfund, responsible for worldwide work with partners and a disaster response team with over 1000 staff. Peter has led change processes within organisations and the development of policy on measuring multilateral effectiveness, and on poverty reduction. In 2010 he was the co-founder of Restored, an organisation working to end violence against women.