Richard Dawkins FRS was Oxford’s inaugural Professor of Public Understanding of Science, retiring in 2008. He was born in Kenya in 1941 and educated in England, doing his Doctorate at Oxford under the Nobel Prizewinning zoologist Niko Tinbergen. 

His latest book, Science in the Soul will form the basis of his talk at the Bluedot Festival. It is a collection of essays ranging from comic parodies of PG Wodehouse to serious discussions of the future, of evolutionary biology, and the role of science in society.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili is an academic physicist, author and broadcaster. Since 2005, he has held a joint chair in physics and in the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey, where he teaches and conducts theoretical research in quantum physics. He received his PhD in nuclear reaction theory in 1989 from Surrey before working as an SERC Postdoctoral Fellow at UCL. He returned to Surrey and was awarded a five year EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship in 1994 before being appointed as a permanent member of staff in 1999.