Lourens’ career boasts experience in several industries including telecommunications, banking, healthcare, finance, industrial manufacturing, scientific research, and B2B marketing.

His journey in data started in the 1990s when he created simulation models for Internet web traffic used for cellular network planning. During the 2000s he moved into healthcare and developed several AI models for which he was the recipient of the Johns Hopkins Starfield Award for early identification of individuals with a high risk of developing lifestyle diseases.

At Informa, Lourens supports the research and development of AI enablers for B2B initiatives by utilising Machine and Deep Learning techniques. His work includes that of Topic Modelling by considering domain specific semantic textual similarity (STS) and the fine tuning of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Llama2 and 3 for multi-class text classification.

Lourens is an Associate Instructor for the Oxford Artificial Intelligence Programme presented by the Oxford Saïd Business School.

Lourens holds an MSc degree in Computer Science and Statistics and a BA degree in History from the University of Cape Town.