About the IAPP

Professor Jim Al-Khalili CBE is an academic, author, broadcaster and one of the UK’s best known science communicators. In the UK, he is most familiar as the host the long-running BBC Radio 4 programme, The Life Scientific. As an academic, Jim is a quantum physicist at the University of Surrey where he is Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He received his PhD in theoretical physics in 1989 and has published over 150 papers in the field.

As well as his regular articles in the media, he has written 15 books on popular science and the history of science, between them translated into twenty-six languages. His book on Medieval Arabic Science, Pathfinders (The House of Wisdom in the US), was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize, and his 2020 book, The World According to Physics, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Book Prize. Many people will also know him from the many TV science documentaries he has hosted over the past two decades, such as Atom, Shock and Awe: the Story of Electricity, Everything and Nothing and the Bafta nominated Chemistry: a volatile history.

Jim is a past president of both the British Science Association and Humanists UK and is a recipient of the Royal Society Michael Faraday medal and the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar medal, the Institute of Physics Kelvin Medal and the Stephen Hawking medal. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Physics and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He received an OBE from the Queen in 2007 and a CBE in 2021, both for ‘services to science and public engagement in STEM’. He has received honorary doctorates from nine universities. He is a trustee and commissioner on the board of the 1851 Royal Commission and a Fellow of the Science Museums Group.