Alan Wilson is Chief Executive of the Alan Turing Institute and Professor of Urban and Regional Systems in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. He is Chair of the Home Office Science Advisory Council and was Chair of the Lead Expert Group for the Government Office for Science Foresight Project on The Future of Cities from June 2013 to December 2015. He writes the weekly Quaestio blog on research and interdisciplinarity. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds from 1991 to 2004 when he became Director-General for Higher Education in the then DfES. From 2007-2013 he was Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is a Member of Academia Europaea, an FBA, an FAcSS and an FRS. He was knighted in 2001. His books include Knowledge power (2010), The science of cities and regions (2012), his five volume (edited) Urban modelling (2012), Explorations in urban and regional dynamics (with Joel Dearden, 2015), Global dynamics (Edited, 2016.) and Geo-Mathematical Modelling (Edited, 2016).