2025 in review

26 Dec 2025

Assumed audience: People balancing ambitious careers with international family life, particularly in tech and research

This year has been a big one in our family. We moved country, started new jobs and started our two-year-old in preschool. Professionally there have been a bunch of firsts for both of us, it’s interesting to look back and reflect.

Moving country

This year we moved from Oxford back to Geneva, where we had previously lived some years before. Life came together unexpectedly around the move: my wife got a prestigious CERN fellowship, I took on a remote role at FAR.AI, and at the exact moment we were considering our offers, Swedish School places were available for our two boys, but only if we confirmed them within a few days.

In all countries, having both parents working full-time, demanding jobs is a challenge. This is doubly true if you’ve moved internationally or have no family supports. The reason the Swedish School was very important for us is that it is one of the few schools we’ve encountered to truly allow for two working parents: after-care means that school covers a full working day, and holiday camps mean that you’re covered for the many weeks that a school is normally closed.

Despite having lived in Geneva before, finding housing was also a major hurdle. When we applied for an ideal place soon after arriving, we were surprised to be asked for a Swiss person to act as guarantor; the Geneva Welcome Center advised us straight up that this was a petty but legal way for the landlord to discriminate against foreigners. It took five months before we could move into a place of our own. Working your entire onboarding period in demanding new jobs whilst in AirBnBs with your kids is not a party.

We were very fortunate that several families remembered us from our previous time in Geneva and helped us out a lot, something we’re extremely grateful for. (Thank you!)

Languages

I obviously love languages.¹ But I think of Australia, the most multi-cultural country I’ve experienced, as a place languages go to die. English is just too convenient and too dominant. Our experience of the UK was the same. Rapidly, my son stopped speaking to me in Swedish, and stopped speaking French despite the immense effort we put into ensuring bilingual French daycare and schooling.

Returning to Geneva, younger brother in tow, both boys entered Swedish/French bilingual schooling here and across the year the languages all returned. Both boys speak to me 75% in Swedish now, and occasionally dip into French for a few words, expressions or sentences. It’s easier and low-friction now for me to read to them in either language, and it no longer feels like I’m forcing something on them, they just enjoy it.

When parenting, it helps to find things you really enjoy doing with the kids. For me, finding illustrators I love is a great motivation to read in French. For example, the Hulotte series of books by French illustrator Juliette Lagrange, which use watercolour and ink to bring the French urban environment and sometimes countryside to life. For example, Les vacances de Hulotte brings the gorges, hills and culture of the Ardèche region to life.

It’s especially delightful to hear my kids latch onto words they love the sound of. For example, my two-year-old started saying encore every time he wanted more of something, and became obsessed with clothing with hoods (capouche!). In practice for our Lucia celebration,² my older son began randomly singing Lusse Lelle and other Lucia carols in Swedish, it was really nice.

Despite being expats here, this linguistic environment makes me feel deeply at home.

Work

This year I joined the AI safety non-profit FAR.AI remotely from Geneva, motivated by the pace of change of frontier models and concern for all the changes that could happen before my kids are even grown.

Across the year, I was able to rapidly take on people management, re-organise the team into independent sub-teams, and grow key people into new leadership roles so that the research team could expand. As someone who loves learning, I also enjoyed building out a map of the safety space, the main players and the problem spaces they have staked out and are making progress on.

Having led in-person teams and full-remote teams, it was quite new for me to lead a hybrid team, where I was many time zones away from the core in-office team in Berkeley. Having a leader remote makes sense if the eventual team might be mostly-remote, but being first is always challenging.

Across the year, I came to feel that I wanted to contribute closer to the ground, and to viscerally feel the changes happening to the entire software profession as more and more becomes automated. That lead me to step down from management to join the technical staff in the research team, something I’m excited for for 2026.

Health and wellbeing

This year we were fortunate to be in the excellent Swiss healthcare system. The system is one of compulsory private cover, expensive but with an excellent standard of care. You could contrast it to Sweden, which has a very low-cost public system, but where small problems can become big because you can’t get them seen to fast enough.

In Geneva, we also live in walking distance of our GP, paediatrician and a local hospital. All of these were needed many times this year.

At year’s end, we counted 10 emergency room visits for all manner of reasons. My two-year-old fell off a wall, needed stitches, then was back again a few weeks later after another fall with new stitches. Multiple respiratory diseases ripped through the family, in addition to stomach flu. My visiting mother in law stayed an extra 6 weeks due to multiple illnesses she picked up. At the hospital cashier, she was asked if she would like to pay by credit card, “as usual”. All in all, it was quite challenging and disrupted any sense of rhythm we could put together.

Nonetheless, I count us lucky in that we are despite all this a generally healthy family with no chronic diseases; considering all the families I know, our kids are generally easy going and enjoyable. Our health issues this year were basically a strange blip for us without much rhyme or reason.

Reflecting overall

Whilst this year has been quite challenging, I have no regrets on entering the AI safety space, or on the move we’ve made back to Geneva. I’m looking forward to more technical work, and given that reduces the overall meeting load, to also find a better balance and be more present with my kids in this early phase of their lives.

I wish you, the reader, well in this year to come!