Caroline Morton

Founder and CTO

Caroline Morton is a software developer, epidemiologist and former GP who co-founded Yellow Bird Consulting in 2020, and now serves as its CTO. After earning a Medical Degree and a BSc in International Health from the University of Birmingham, Caroline moved to London to do her junior doctor training. Between her foundation and GP training, she pivoted to epidemiology, earning her MSc at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. This diverse academic foundation paved the way for her unique career path, where medicine, epidemiology, and software development intersect.

During her time in London, Caroline initiated the UK’s first programming course for doctors and medical students, “Coding for Medicine,” complementing this with a textbook “Computational Medicine”, written with her fellow course lead. She later moved to the University of Oxford to work as an Epidemiologist and Software Developer, playing a key role in developing OpenSAFELY, a trusted research environment for processing COVID-19 data during the pandemic. Her work in this area led to the publication of over 50 peer-reviewed papers in well-known journals such as Nature, the Lancet, and the BMJ.

Currently, Caroline serves as a Senior Clinical Research Fellow in Health Data Engineering at Queen Mary University of London. Her work involves full-stack programming for the Genes and Health research environment, where she focuses on improving the efficiency, accuracy, and reusability of epidemiological and statistical code, as well as enhancing data pipelines.

At Yellow Bird, Caroline combines her understanding of medicine and epidemiology with her skills in Rust and Python microservices. She also possesses extensive experience in Docker, and unit and integration testing. Currently, she is co-authoring a book on Async programming with Maxwell Flitton, another co-founder of Yellow Bird.

When she steps away from her professional responsibilities, Caroline enjoys taking her dog, CJ, for walks in the woods, growing her own vegetables, and learning Spanish. Her wide-ranging interests mirror the diverse skills and experiences that she brings to Yellow Bird Consulting and the broader tech industry.