Women and the Future of Science

Jim Al-Khalili is a theoretical physicist and currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Physics at the University of Surrey. He received his PhD in nuclear reaction theory in 1989 and has published widely in the field. His current research interests are in open quantum systems, the application of quantum mechanics in biology and the foundations and history of quantum mechanics. In 2018, he helped establish at Surrey the world’s first doctoral training centre in quantum biology and, in 2020, set up a new Quantum Foundations Centre.

Jim is a prominent author and broadcaster. He has written 16 books on popular science and the history of science, between them translated into twenty-six languages. Two of his books (Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology and The World According to Physics) were shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi and Winton Prizes, respectively. He is a regular presenter of TV science documentaries, such as the Bafta nominated Chemistry: a volatile history, and he hosts the long-running weekly BBC Radio 4 programme, The Life Scientific.

Jim is a past president of the British Science Association, an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and 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 for Science Communication. He received an OBE in 2007 and a CBE in 2021 for ‘services to science’.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell DBE is an astrophysicist. She was responsible for the discovery of pulsars while a radio astronomy graduate student in Cambridge and has subsequently worked in gamma ray, X-ray, infrared and millimetre wavelength astronomy. She currently holds a Professorial Fellowship in Mansfield College, University of Oxford, and is a Visiting Academic in the University's Department of Physics.

She was awarded the Michael Faraday Prize (2010) and a Royal Medal (2015) by the Royal Society and also holds major awards from French, Spanish and USA bodies. A member of 7 Academies worldwide, she was the first female President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (as well as of the Institute of Physics).

She is currently Chancellor of the University of Dundee and was previously a Pro Vice Chancellor of Trinity College Dublin. She holds numerous Honorary Doctorates.

Professor Michele Dougherty CBE FRAS FRS is Executive Chair, Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) which is part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Michele is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College. She led unmanned exploratory missions to Saturn and Jupiter, was Principal Investigator of the magnetometer instrument onboard the Cassini mission to Saturn and is Principal Investigator of the magnetometer for the European Space Agency's JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE) that launched in April 2023.

Michele has been recipient of several awards during her career, including a CBE, a Royal Astronomical Society Geophysics Gold medal and the Institute of Physics Richard Glazebrook Gold Medal and Prize. In July 2025 she was appointed as the United Kingdom’s first female Astronomer Royal and from October 2025 she is President of the Institute of Physics.

Judith Howard is a practically minded structural chemist who characterises compounds using pioneering techniques. Judith has built instruments that allow scientists to apply techniques to experimentally prove theories and advance the field of X-ray crystallography.

X-ray crystallography analyses the three-dimensional atomic structure of molecules by firing X-rays at them and examining the diffraction pattern that results. Judith developed low temperature and neutron diffraction methods to more precisely determine electron density, chemical bonding and magnetic properties in molecules.

Prolific in her contributions to science, with over 1,500 publications to her name, Judith actively participates in committees and conferences worldwide. She was the first woman to head a five-star chemistry department (at the University of Durham), and was the President of the British Crystallographic Association. Judith was made a CBE in 1996 and won the Royal Society of Chemistry Structural Chemistry Award in 1999.

Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu DBE FMedSci is President of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UCL’s Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience, a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a governor on the Wellcome board (one of the largest biomedical sciences research charities in the world), a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences Council and Chief Scientific Officer of Nanomerics Ltd. Uchegbu has served as Chair of the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Scientific Secretary of the Controlled Release Society and she is the immediate past UCL Provost’s Envoy for Race Equality, a role in which she led on race equality work at UCL. Her work led to the removal of the names of prominent eugenicists from all of UCL’s buildings in 2020. Uchegbu has also presented to the UK House of Commons on the educational racial disparities that lead to a lack of ethnic minority representation in scientific research.

Uchegbu is an inventor. Her company, Nanomerics Ltd. is developing medicines that address sight threatening illnesses and one of these medicines is in clinical trials. Nanomerics has also out licensed medicines developed in her laboratory to a US pharmaceutical company. Technologies developed in Uchegbu’s laboratory have won prizes from the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. Nanomerics Ltd. won the King’s Award for Enterprise 2024 in the Innovation category. The King’s Award for Enterprise is the most UK’s most prestigious business award.

Uchegbu was made Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) in the King’s New Years Honours 2025.

Christl Donnelly is a statistician and epidemiologist studying the spread and control of infectious diseases, with a particular interest in outbreaks. She studied mathematics (BA) at Oberlin College and biostatistics (MSc, ScD) at Harvard School of Public Health, graduating in 1992. Following a lecturer position at University of Edinburgh (1992-95), she joined the Wellcome Trust Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases at University of Oxford (1995-00). Since 2000, she has worked at Imperial College London. Christl has studied Zika virus, Ebola, MERS, influenza, SARS, bovine TB, foot-and-mouth disease, rabies, cholera, dengue, BSE/vCJD, malaria and HIV/AIDS. She is a leading member of the WHO Ebola Response Team (2014-). She was also deputy chair of the Independent Scientific Group on Cattle TB (1998-2007) which designed, oversaw and analysed the Randomised Badger Culling Trial. In addition to epidemiology and disease control, she is interested in conservation and animal welfare. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of the Zoological Society of London. In 2002, she won the Franco-British prize for scientific research from the Académie des Sciences in Paris.

Professor Louise Archer OBE holds the Karl Mannheim Chair in Sociology of Education at UCL. Her research seeks to understand and support equity and diversity in STEM, particularly in relation to social class, gender and race/ethnicity across primary, secondary, higher and informal learning contexts. She has authored 180+ academic publications and has directed numerous large-scale national and international research studies, including the 14-year, ESRC-funded ASPIRES study, a mixed methods research project examining what shapes young people’s trajectories into and away from STEM, from age 10-22. Louise is passionate about participatory approaches, working with teachers, professionals and young people to develop more equitable educational policies and practices. The impact of her research on supporting diversity and inclusion in STEM has been recognised through prizes from the Royal Society (2022), ESRC (2020) and British Educational Research Association (2019). She co-founded the Athena SWAN Charter and her services to education were recognised in the 2025 King’s New Years Honours. She is a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) and the Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS).

Afua Kyei is the Chief Financial Officer of the Bank of England. She was recognised as the UK’s most influential Black person on the Powerlist 2026. On International Women’s Day 2025, Afua was named on the Independent’s Influence list in the Top 20 most influential women in the UK. She joined in June 2019 and has been at the core of the Bank's leadership and decision making. Afua oversees the financial governance of the Bank's balance sheet, which grew to over £1 trillion during the Covid pandemic. She has helped oversee the upgrade of the UK's Real Time Gross Settlement System in 2025, which processes £790bn payments each day.

Afua is a keynote speaker and represents the Bank at fora including the International Monetary Fund, G20 and COP. In 2024, Afua was honoured as the top female on the Empower Global Executives Role Model List. She was recognised in the 2024 Women of the Year Awards. In 2023, Afua was awarded the Freedom of the City of London. She was named CFO of the Year 2021 by the Women in Finance Awards UK.

Afua joined the Bank from Barclays Bank (2012-2019) where she was the Chief Financial Officer Mortgages and also helped Barclays' deliver its strategic cost transformation program, TRANSFORM. During the Global Financial Crisis, she was an Investment Banker at UBS (2007-2012). Prior to that, Afua qualified as a Chartered Accountant (ICAS) with Ernst & Young.

Afua read Chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford University (MChem, 2000-2004) where she was a member of Professor Sir Jack Baldwin's research group; her Organic Chemistry research on the creation of anti-tumorous molecules using Organic Synthesis was published in an international science journal. She was also awarded a Junior Research Fellowship by Princeton University in Organic Chemistry. In 2023, Afua was elected an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford University.

Corinne Le Quéré is a physicist specialised in understanding the carbon cycle and how it interacts with the Earth’s climate. Her original approaches are helping to determine how and why the natural carbon reservoirs are changing, particularly in the Southern Ocean. She spearheaded the development of marine carbon-cycle models with new ways to represent plankton biodiversity and ecology. She also instigated and led for 13 years the annual update of the ’global carbon budget’, an international effort to keep track of global carbon emissions and their fate in the environment.

Corinne is Royal Society Research Professor of Climate Change Science at the University of East Anglia. She authored three assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She was founding Chair of the French Haut conseil pour le climat (2019-2024) and is member of the UK Committee on Climate Change, two independent committees that advise their respective Governments on responding to climate change. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2019 for services to climate change science. She received the 2020 Dr AH Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences and other awards for her contributions to science.

Baroness Brown is an eminent British engineer. After a career in academia and industry she joined the House of Lords as a Crossbench Peer in 2016. From 2023-2025 she chaired the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee, and now sits on the Intelligence and Security Committee.

Her key interests are climate change, innovation and technology and science education. Current appointments include: Chair of the Adaptation Committee of the Climate Change Committee; Chair of Frontier IP; NED of Ørsted and of Ceres Power. She chairs the Royal Society Education Committee and the Royal Academy of Engineering Green Future Fellowships Steering Committee.

Dr Susan Graham is a biomedical engineer, entrepreneur, and global thought leader on technology-driven innovation. She co-founded and led Dendra Systems, scaling it from a five-person startup into a global leader in ecological restoration technology, and raised $43M in venture funding. Recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30, the Advance Award, and as a Pritzker Environmental Prize finalist, Susan has pioneered world-first innovations in AI, automation, and impact. A sought-after speaker at the UN, TED, and Forbes, she inspires audiences with her vision for how science and entrepreneurship can tackle the world’s most pressing challenges.

Gabi Hegerl is a climate scientist who focuses on identifying the drivers and mechanisms of observed climate change. This work provides a critical underpinning to predictions of future changes.

Gabi published some of the first studies determining that recent warming is statistically different from climate variability, and pioneered a method that distinguishes between possible causes for climate change, such as greenhouse gas increases or changes in the sun. She has also made important contributions to estimating the climate sensitivity, and to determining the causes of changing characteristics of extreme weather events. Gabi’s recent work has shown that human influences have changed global precipitation patterns, sharpening the contrast between wet and dry regions, while volcanic eruptions show an opposite effect.

Gabi has had key roles in scientific assessments of climate change (IPCC), and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She received a Royal Society Wolfson Merit award; the Hans Sigrist Prize awarded by Bern University (2016) and the Achievement Award of the International Meeting on Statistical Climatology.

Professor Stephanie Henson is a Principal Scientist at the National Oceanography Centre and Honorary Professor at the University of Southampton. She leads a large, active research group in global biogeochemical oceanography. Her particular research interests aim at understanding the natural variability and climate change effects on phytoplankton populations, and subsequent impacts on the biological carbon pump. Her research exploits autonomous vehicles, satellite and in situ data, as well as output from biogeochemical models. In 2024, she received the European Geosciences Union’s Fridtjof Nansen medal for “outstanding research into the ocean’s role in the carbon cycle, built on her extraordinary ability to combine diverse observational data with novel biogeochemical models.” She was a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report, on the chapter “Carbon and other biogeochemical cycles and feedbacks”.

Lidia Arthur Brito was appointed UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Natural Sciences in November 2023. A forest engineer with a Master’s and Doctorate in Forest and Wood Science from Colorado State University-USA, she was born in Mozambique and has been part of Eduardo Mondlane University’s staff since her graduation in Forest Engineering in 1981. She has held senior positions in Mozambique such as Head of the Forestry Department from the Faculty of Agronomy (1997-1998), Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs of Eduardo Mondlane University (1998-2000), Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology (2000-2005), and Advisor for Strategic Planning and External Relations of the Mayor of Maputo City (2005-2008).

She joined UNESCO in November 2009 as Director for Science Policy and Sustainable Development in the Natural Sciences Sector, in Paris, and in 2014 she was appointed UNESCO Regional Director for Sciences in Latin America and the Caribbean region (UNESCO Montevideo Office). In 2022, she became Director of the UNESCO Multisectoral Regional Office for Southern Africa in Harare (Zimbabwe) and UNESCO Representative for Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Her areas of expertise range from forestry and sustainable management of natural resources to higher education, science, and technology policies and programmes as part of public policies for sustainable development. She has chaired several commissions and task teams in Higher Education and STI for Sustainable Development. She co-chaired the Scientific Organizing Committee for Planet under Pressure Conference in London, a major conference for the preparation of Rio+20, and she has been a member of several international Boards such as the African Forestry Forum Governing Board, the Centre for Higher Education Trust (CHET) Board, the Stockholm Environment Institute Governing Board, and the Bioversity Governing Board, among others. From 2018 to 2021, she chaired the regional organizing committee of the Open Science Forum for Latin America and the Caribbean (CILAC), a key regional space for debates and exchanges to promote sustainable policies throughout science, technology, and innovation.

Professor Alison Noble CBE FREng FRS is currently the Technikos Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford and a Vice President and Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society.

Alison has worked in industry and academia. Her academic research interests are at the inter-disciplinary interface of artificial intelligence (computer vision) and healthcare imaging. She is a current recipient of a UKRI Turing AI World-Leader Researcher Fellowship themed around human-AI collaboration in healthcare imaging. Alison has worked with clinical partners in the UK, India, and Kenya on translational AI-based imaging science, and commercialised some of her group’s research via a spinout company which is now used in clinics worldwide.

Alison is a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering and of the Royal Society. She has worked closely with the Royal Society data science policy team for a number of years including chairing  working groups leading to policy reports on "Protecting privacy in practice" (2019), “From privacy to partnership” (2023) and most recently and relevant to this meeting  “Science in the age of AI” (May 2024).

Alison received an OBE in 2013 and was awarded her CBE for services to engineering and biomedical imaging in the 2023 King’s Birthday Honours List.

Professor Sheila Rowan FRS is the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow and Physical Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society. Since 2009, Professor Rowan has been Director of the Institute for Gravitational Research at the University of Glasgow’s School of Physics and Astronomy. Her research contributed to one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of this century: the first detection of gravitational waves announced in February 2016. This resulted in a share of the 2016 Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her and the members of her team in Glasgow. She received the Hoyle Medal and Prize of the IOP in 2016, the Harold Hartley Medal of the Institute of Measurement and Control in 2020 and was made a CBE in 2021. She received the (inaugural) Philip Leverhulme Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. Sheila served from 2018 - 24 on the Council of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, latterly as its Senior Independent Member and Co-Chair. From 2016 - 21 she was the Chief Scientific Advisor to the Scottish Government, and from 2021 - 23 served as President of the Institute of Physics (IoP). She is currently the Deputy Chair of the Strategic Advisory Board for the UK National Quantum Technology Program.

Polina Bayvel is an electrical engineer who has made major contributions to the investigation and design of high-bandwidth, multi-wavelength optical communication networks. Formerly a Royal Society University Research Fellow (1993-2003), her research has focused on maximising the speed and capacity of optical fibre transmission systems, and the fundamental studies of capacity-limiting optical nonlinearities and their mitigation. She heads the Optical Networks Group, a group she founded in 1994, as the first academic systems engineering group in optical communications & networks.

She was one of the first to show the feasibility of using the wavelength domain for routing in optical networks over a range of distance- and time-scales. She has established the applicability of these new optical network architecture concepts, which have been widely implemented in commercial systems and networks. These systems and networks underpin the Internet, and the digital communications infrastructure - and are essential for its growth.

Polina Bayvel is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2002), and a recipient of a number of awards. These include the 2002 Institute of Physics (IoP) Clifford Paterson Medal, 2013 IEEE Photonic Society Engineering Achievement Award, 2014 Royal Society Clifford Paterson Lecture & Medal, and 2015 Royal Academy of Engineering Colin Campbell Mitchell Award. She was awarded CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2017 New Year's Honours List, for services to engineering and in 2021 received the Thomas Young Medal of the Institute of Physics - the first woman to do so. She was also the first woman since 1800 to have received the Royal Society Rumford Medal in 2023. In 2024 she received the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Polina Bayvel is a dedicated supervisor dedicated to inspiring and developing the careers of younger researchers, most of whom are themselves academic and industrial leaders, developing next-generation communications & networks. She is also a vocal advocate for the importance and need for ubiquitous, secure, low-delay and high-capacity communications infrastructure to support the digital economy and new applications with the potential to transform people's lives. In 2024 she was awarded the Royal Society Research Professorship in 'Optical Networks – seeing through the cloud' to explore next-generation intelligent, adaptive and resilient optical networks.

Polina was awarded DBE (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 2026 New Years Honours List for services to engineering and optical communications.