Board of trustees

Sense About Science is governed by a Board of Trustees. Members of the Board of Trustees sit as individuals, not as representatives of any other organisation.

Professor Paul Hardaker (Chair)

Paul Hardaker is a mathematician by background whose PhD and early research work focused on radio propagation through the atmosphere. He worked at the Met Office for 14 years in a variety of roles including the Met Office’s Chief Advisor to Government, providing support to the Government in areas such as climate change policy, the civil contingency programme and the UK’s Public Met Service. He is currently Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society. He is also Chairman of the NERC directed programme on the Flood Risk from Extreme Events (FREE) and holds visiting professorships at both the University of Salford and the University of Reading. Paul is also a Non-Executive Director on the Board of Berkshire West Primary Care Trust and is actively involved with local and regional healthcare initiatives.

Professor Dame Bridget Ogilvie FMedSci FRS (Vice-Chair)

Bridget Ogilvie initially studied agriculture in Australia and then undertook research on the immune response to parasitic infections with the UK Medical Research Council before joining the staff of the Wellcome Trust, from which she retired as Director in 1998. She is now a Visiting Professor at UCL from where she is involved in a range of non-executive activities in the fields of science, education and their interaction with the public.

Professor Janet Bainbridge OBE

Janet Bainbridge is passionately interested in making science accessible and in 2000 was awarded the OBE for services to science. She sits on the OneNorthEast Science and Industry Council. She was Chair of the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes until 2003. She is Chair of the GM Organisms (contained use) Advisory Committee and Chair of the British Potato Council Research Committee.

Dr Michael Fitzpatrick

Michael Fitzpatrick has been a General Practitioner in Hackney, London for the past 15 years. He has written on a wide range of medical and political subjects for both medical publications and the mainstream media. He is Health Editor of the on-line magazine spiked and writes for the British Journal of Medical Practice. He is the author of The Tyranny of Health (Routledge 2001) and MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know (Routledge 2004).

Ms Diana Garnham

Diana Garnham is Chief Executive of the Science Council. She was previously Chief Executive of the Association of Medical Research Charities. She is involved in a wide range of other committees and advisory groups within higher education, health and science and the voluntary sector. She has written for both science and general publications on subjects as diverse as the national lottery, public debate and engagement in medical science and the management of intellectual property. Her academic background is in politics and international affairs.

Professor Sir Brian Heap CBE FRS

Brian Heap is a biological scientist publishing in reproductive biology, biotechnology and sustainabiity. He is President of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) and was Vice-President and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society, editor of Philosophical Transactions B of the Royal Society, Master of St Edmund's College, Cambridge, Director of the Institute of Animal Physiology and Genetics Research (Babraham and Roslin) and Director of Science at the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council. He is Special Professor at the University of Nottingham, was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the Expert Group on Cloning at the Department of Health, and has worked on developing country issues, particularly in China.

Professor Chris Leaver CBE FRS

Chris Leaver is Emeritus Professor of Plant Science and formerly Head of the Department of Plant Science at the University of Oxford.He has a strong interest in the public understanding of science and has been actively involved in the debate on genetically modified crops in the UK and Europe. In 2000, he was awarded the CBE for services to plant sciences. He is a Trustee of the John Innes Foundation and serves on the Governing Council of the John Innes Centre.

Baroness O’Neill of Bengarve

Onora O’Neill has degrees from Oxford and Harvard, and has taught in the United States and at the University of Essex. She was Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge from 1992 to 2006. She writes on ethics and political philosophy, with particular interests in international justice, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and bioethics.

Mr Nick Ross

Nick Ross read psychology at Queen’s University Belfast and later became a Doctor of the University (honoris causa). He has been a leading broadcaster across a wide range of issues. He helped to change the climate of science reporting in the early 90s with an influential series of articles critical of media portrayal of science, and has been a member of the Committee on Public Understanding of Science and twice chairman of the Science Book Prize. He is a regular speaker at science meetings, is President of HealthWatch which campaigns for evidence-based medicine, is a supporter of the Campbell Collaboration, the international partnership to improve scientific methodology in the social sciences, and he founded the new discipline of Crime Science. He is an Honorary Fellow and visiting professor at UCL.

Dr Simon Singh

Simon Singh completed his PhD in particle physics at the University of Cambridge before joining the BBC science department in 1990. He was a producer and director on programmes such as Tomorrow’s World and Horizon. Fermat’s Last Theorem, his documentary about the world’s most notorious mathematical problem, won a BAFTA in 1997, and he also wrote a book on the same which became the first mathematics book to become a No.1 bestseller in Britain. In 1999 Simon published The Code Book, a history of codes and code-breaking, and in 2004 he published Big Bang, a history of cosmology. His broadcasting includes a 5-part series on the history of cryptography for Channel 4 (The Science of Secrecy), two series of Mind Games on BBC4 and three series of Five Numbers for Radio 4. He has been a trustee of NESTA and the National Museum of Science and Industry, and he has a strong interest in science education in schools.