A longstanding Ambassador and a very active community member, Jo recently attended the Philanthropy event at the Francis Crick institute. Jo lost his wife Sue to a rare cancer named phaeochromocytoma in 2003, and following this, they found out that of his four children, two also have the faulty gene that cut short their mother's life. Jo has been in a Cancer Research pledge video in memory of his wife and to raise awareness of the important work that cancer researchers do for people like his children. He also founded his own cancer charity dedicated to research on his wife and children's condition called The Phaeo and Para Cancer Charity.  Jo is a constituent of John Swinney and it was thanks to a meeting he had with him that the FM agreed to visit the CRUK Scotland Institute in May 2025. Jo attended this visit, alongside ambassadors Shaumya Kularajan and Ryan Devlin. CRUK has nominated Jo for a King’s Honour and Mr Swinney wrote a supporting letter for this. When the Scotland PA team spoke to the FM at the recent SNP conference in Aberdeen in October, the first thing he said was how great Jo was as an advocate for CRUK and how much he valued their regular meetings. Jo also attended our manifesto launch outside the Scottish Parliament in September.