The Speakers

Andy Extance is the Chair of the ABSW. He fuses chemistry and physics – and whatever other elements cross his desk – into words, thanks to a career infused with both fields. He has been a freelance science writer since 2003, working for employers such as Chemistry World and BBC Future. He was news editor for Compound Semiconductor magazine from 2006-2009. 

Before that, Andy worked in industrial chemistry, briefly making adhesives and rubber after spending six and a half years working at Tripos Discovery Research, an early-stage contract pharmaceutical research company. He is also a director of Exeter Community Energy, director of Exeter Empirical and Editor-in-chief of ScienceSeeker.

Sir Jeremy Farrar OBE FMedSci FRS is the Director of Wellcome, a global charitable foundation which supports science to solve urgent health challenges. 

Jeremy’s whole career has been dedicated to protecting and improving global health. As a researcher he specialised in infectious diseases, and he has published more than 600 papers.  

Born in Singapore, Jeremy lived there and in Cyprus, New Zealand and Libya as a child before moving to the UK as a teenager. He holds degrees in immunology and medicine from University College London and a doctorate in neuroimmunology from the University of Oxford. He trained as a doctor in London, Edinburgh, Melbourne, San Francisco and Oxford.

Jeremy spent 18 years leading the Clinical Research Unit at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where he made many pivotal advances in the understanding of diseases like tuberculosis (TB), malaria, typhoid, dengue and influenza, as well as helping to train scientists from across South-east Asia and beyond. He joined Wellcome as Director in 2013. 

As part of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Jeremy is a member of the UK Vaccine Taskforce and the Principles Group of the ACT-Accelerator hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO), and he chairs the WHO R&D Blueprint Advisory Group. As well as sharing his expertise, he champions rapid investment in research on Covid-19 testing, treatments and vaccines, and argues that everyone – not only people who live in rich countries – should benefit equally from the discoveries that result. 

He has held a number of other advisory roles for governments and international bodies such as the WHO and UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). He was named 12th in the Fortune list of World’s 50 Greatest Leaders in 2015 and was awarded the Memorial Medal and Ho Chi Minh City Medal from the Government of Vietnam for services to public health, medicine and research. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the European Molecular Biology Organization, the US National Academies and the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2018 he received the President Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Humanitarian of the Year Award and in 2019 was knighted for services to global health. 

Jeremy lives in Oxford with his wife and children. He loves all sport but he’s most passionate about cricket and still plays regularly for Steeple Aston Cricket Club. He’s also a keen walker, whether that’s in the Alps or across the Oxfordshire hills with the family dogs, Coco and Sẽp-Y.

Natasha Loder is the health policy editor at The Economist. She has worked there for over 20 years in a range of reporting roles mostly in science, technology, and medicine. Between 2011 and 2015 she was based in Chicago and covered politics, education, and American life. After this, she moved to a health beat. Before arriving at The Economist she worked at Nature, and The Times Higher Education Supplement. She has won awards for her work in feature writing, news, opinion, and investigative reporting. She is a former chair of the Association of British Science Writers, and a current judge of the John Maddox Prize. This recognises the work of individuals who promote sound science and evidence. Together with Alok Jha she hosts The Jab, a podcast from The Economist, focusing on the global vaccination race.

Katharine Sanderson is an award-winning science journalist and editor who mostly writes about the physical sciences, for titles including Nature, New Scientist and many others.

She was a news editor and reporter at Nature for several years, and started her journalism career at Chemistry World when it first launched.

Katharine also teaches modules on science writing at Leeds University and King's College London. She has BSc and MSc chemistry degrees from Imperial College and a PhD in chemistry from Cambridge University.  She is a member of the Executive Board of the ABSW and of the Programme Committee for UKCSJ22.

Katharine has made the most of freelancing to live in different places, including the French pyrenees, and is now based on the Lizard peninsula, Cornwall. 

Linda Geddes is a Bristol-based freelance journalist writing about biology, medicine and technology. Born in Cambridge, she graduated from Liverpool University with a first-class degree in Cell Biology. She spent nine years at New Scientist magazine working as a news editor, features editor and reporter, and remains a consultant to the magazine. Linda has received numerous awards for her journalism, including the Association of British Science Writers’ awards for Best Investigative Journalism. She is married with two young children, Matilda and Max.

Kit Yates is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences and co-director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath. He completed his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Oxford in 2011.

His research demonstrates that mathematics can be used to describe all sorts of real-world phenomena: from embryo formation to locust swarming and from sleeping sickness to egg-shell patterning. He is particularly interested in the role that randomness plays in Biology. His research into Mathematical Biology has been covered by the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, RTE, Scientific American and Reuters amongst others.

Along side his academic position, Kit is also an author and science communicator. His first book, “The Maths of Life and Death“, was published on September 5th 2019, by Quercus.

Kit’s writing about the enjoyment and ubiquity of Mathematics has appeared in the Guardian, the Times, the Huffington Post, the i, the independent, the Daily Mail, and popular science publications such as Scientific American and IFLscience as well as having over 1.4 million reads on the Conversation. Kit sets real-world-based mathematical puzzles which have appeared in a range of newspapers, on tube adverts and on the radio. He has also made appearances on Panorama, More or Less, BBC News, Bang goes the theory, BBC Inside Science, Sky News, Numberphile  and even on Watchdog.

He also shares his enthusiasm and love of  Mathematics in keynote speeches at conferences,  festivals as well as schools and workshops as part of his role as widening participation, outreach and engagement officer at the University of Bath.

Joseph Harker is Senior Editor, Diversity, and Development at The Guardian. He is also a columnist and former Deputy Opinion Editor

For 20 years Joseph has run the Guardian's Positive Action Scheme, which offers enhanced work experience to aspiring journalists who are ethnic-minority or have a disability: many have gone on to have successful media careers.

Before joining the Guardian, Joseph was Editor and Publisher of the weekly newspaper Black Briton, and prior to that he was Assistant Editor at The Voice.

He tweets at @josephharker

Miriam Frankel is an author and science journalist based in London. She is science editor for The Conversation and has written for publications including The Guardian, New Scientist, Nature, FQXi and Physics World. Her first book, 'Are you thinking clearly?: 29 reasons you aren't and what to do about it' co-written with Matt Warren, was published in August 2022 by Hodder Studio (Hachette).

Matin Durrani is editor-in-chief of Physics World, where he helps the editorial team to come up with brilliant, thoughtful, informative and entertaining articles and multimedia from every corner of physics and from all over the globe. Before moving into publishing, he studied chemical physics at the University of Bristol and went on to do a PhD and postdoc in polymer physics with Athene Donald at the University of Cambridge. These days he still enjoys covering practical, everyday physics of that kind and has a soft spot for science communication and the history of physics. He also likes reporting on his various trips and visits around the world meeting all kinds of people in the physics community. Outside work, Matin is busy thinking up a sequel to his popular-science book Furry Logic: the Physics of Animal Life, which he wrote with Liz Kalaugher, and also has an unhealthy interest in Birmingham City FC and the German language.

(Image courtesy Jo Hansford Photography)

Philip Ball is a freelance science writer. He worked previously at Nature for over 20 years, first as an editor for physical sciences (for which his brief extended from biochemistry to quantum physics and materials science) and then as a Consultant Editor. His writings on science for the popular press have covered topical issues ranging from cosmology to the future of molecular biology.

Philip is the author of many popular books on science, including works on the nature of water, pattern formation in the natural world, colour in art, the science of social and political philosophy, the cognition of music, and physics in Nazi Germany. He has written widely on the interactions between art and science, and has delivered lectures to scientific and general audiences at venues ranging from the Victoria and Albert Museum (London) to the NASA Ames Research Center, London's National Theatre and the London School of Economics.

Philip continues to write regularly for Nature. He has contributed to publications ranging from New Scientist to the New York Times, the Guardian, the Financial Times and New Statesman. He is a contributing editor of Prospect magazine (for which he writes a science blog), and also a columnist for Chemistry World, Nature Materials, and the Italian science magazine Sapere. He has broadcast on many occasions on radio and TV, and is a presenter of "Science Stories" on BBC Radio 4. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, sits on the editorial board of Chemistry World and Interdiscipinary Science Reviews, and is a board member of the RESOLV network on solvation science at the Ruhr University of Bochum.

Philip has a BA in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Physics from the University of Bristol.

Amil Khan used to be a foreign correspondent, working across the Middle East and Asia for Reuters and the BBC. He left journalism to help good causes navigate the new information landscape. He is currently Director of Valent Projects a digital communications agency that counters disinformation campaigns through research and strategy, response, training and social media.

Angela Saini is an award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster. She presents science programmes on the BBC, and her writing has appeared in New Scientist, The Sunday Times, National Geographic and Wired. 

Her latest book, Superior: the Return of Race Science, was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and named a book of the year by The Telegraph, Nature and Financial Times. Her previous book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, has been translated into thirteen languages. 

Angela has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Oxford and was a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the ABSW Executive Board and of the Programme Committee for UKCSJ22.

Shamini Bundell is an award-winning science video journalist with a love of fossils and nerdery. After working for several years in television production, Shamini is now a Senior Multimedia Editor at Nature where she produces, edits, films and occasionally presents short-form documentaries for Nature's online channels. In her spare time she also co-runs and co-hosts the RPGeeks, a weekly live-stream, podcast and TikTok channel that combines tabletop role-playing games like 'Dungeons & Dragons' with science communication. 

Rohin Francis is a consultant cardiologist in Essex, and former academic. He runs a YouTube channel called 'Medlife Crisis' where he attempts to combine education with comedy, to varying degrees of success. He focuses on medical science and currently has half a million subscribers. Some of his COVID coverage won the ABSW/NUJ Stephen White Award for science reporting in a non-science context in 2021.

Jeevan Vasagar is Climate Editor at Tortoise Media, responsible for coverage of the climate crisis and the environment. He was formerly Environment Editor at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.