Matt Parker is a stand-up comedian and mathematician. He appears regularly on TV and online: as well as being a presenter on the Discovery Channel his YouTube videos have been viewed over 37 million times. Previously a high-school math teacher, Matt visits schools to talk to students about math as part of Think Maths and he is involved in the Maths Inspiration shows. In his remaining free time, Matt wrote the books Things To Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension and Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors. He is also the Public Engagement in Mathematics Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.

Tim is an economist, journalist and broadcaster who authored “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy”, “Messy”, and the million-selling “The Undercover Economist”. Tim is a senior columnist at the Financial Times, and the presenter of Radio 4’s “More or Less” and the iTunes-topping series “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy”. Tim has spoken at TED, PopTech and the Sydney Opera House. He is a visiting fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Tim was Economics Commentator of the Year 2014, winner of the Royal Statistical Society journalistic excellence award 2015, won the Society of Business Economists writing prize 2014-15, and the Bastiat Prize for economic journalism in 2006 and 2016.

Mark Miodownik is the UCL Professor of Materials & Society.  He received his Ph.D in turbine jet engine alloys from Oxford University, and has worked as a materials engineer in the USA, Ireland and the UK. For more than fifteen years he has championed materials science research that links to the arts and humanities, medicine, and society. This culminated in the establishment of the UCL Institute of Making, where he is a director and runs the research programme.  Mark is a multi-award winning author and regularly presents BBC TV and radio programmes on materials science and engineering.  In 2014 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2018 he was awarded an MBE for services to materials science, engineering and broadcasting.

Elise Andrew is the Managing Editor and founder of “I Fucking Love Science” (IFLS). The website began as a hobby during her time at university, and it now reaches hundreds of millions of people a year. The Zoological Society of London awarded Andrew the Samford Raffles Award for her efforts in science communication, and she was named by Forbes as a “30 to watch under 30”.

Michele Dougherty is Professor of Space Physics at and Head of the Physics Department at Imperial College London. She is leading unmanned exploratory missions to Saturn and Jupiter and was the Principal Investigator for both the magnetometer instrument onboard the Cassini mission to Saturn, and the magnetometer for the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) due for launch in June 2022. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society, was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society Geophysics Gold medal in 2017, was awarded a CBE in the 2018 New Year’s Honours List, and was awarded the Institute of Physics Richard Glazebrook Gold Medal and Prize.

Jack McMinn is a 22-year-old postgrad student studying Zoology at the 
University of Cambridge; more specifically the molar morphometry of 
African mammals, and if any significant correlations exist between 
dental similarity and relatedness quotients. He’s a member of the 
Cambridge Impronauts and also enjoys watching nature documentaries and 
playing piano/sax. As a kid, he was once thrown out of a shopping mall 
because he attempted to start an impromptu business telling facts about 
dinosaurs to the unsuspecting visitors of a travelling Natural History 
Museum exhibition.

I’m a physicist from Mexico, interested in everything with “quantum” in its name (except maybe quantum detergent). I came to the UK to do my PhD at the University of Leeds and now I’m a postdoc at the University of Brighton. I think science is awesome and I try to share my passion about physics through outreach and public engagement.  

Ed is a writer and improviser from London. His outstanding scientific credentials are compromised only by being entirely fictional. So far, his main contribution to science has been staying out of science, for which scientists are very grateful.

Louie is studying for a Physics degree here at Imperial, in the hopes of legitimizing his plans for world optimization. He wants to use big science to solve social issues, or at least replace them with more interesting problems.

Katherine is a medical student at Imperial College London. She strongly believes in the importance of pushing the limits of scientific knowledge, and is proud to say that her theories remain, as ever, unhindered by such trivial restrictions as accuracy.

Dr Charvy Narain is a recovering neuroscientist who currently works in science communication. She did her undergraduate degree at the University of Delhi in India, before moving to the University of Oxford for her masters and doctorate, followed by a long stint in science publishing.

Photograph by Steve Cross.