Prof. Steve Jones University College London, UK

Steve Jones is President of the Galton Institute and Professor of Genetics in the Department of Biology at University College London. He is the author of more than 100 scholarly publications, as well as several best-selling books on genetics, including "In the Blood" (HarperCollins, 1995, reprinted 7 times), "Almost like... read morea Whale: The Origin of Species Updated" (Anchor Books, 1999, published in the USA as Darwin's Ghost, 2000) and "Y: the Descent of Men" (Little, Brown, 2002). In 1991 he presented the Reith Lectures on "The Language of the Genes" and since then has written and presented a long-running BBC Radio 3 series on science and the arts, "Blue Skies", and a six-part BBC TV series on human genetics, "In the Blood", broadcast in 1996. He has been awarded numerous book prizes, including the Rhone-Poulenc book prize (1994), the Yorkshire Post First Book Prize (1994), and the BP Natural World Book Prize (both in 1999 and 2000). In 1997 he was awarded the Royal Society Faraday Medal for public understanding of science, and in 2002 he was awarded the Institute of Biology Charter Medal.