Samira Ahmed

Samira Ahmed is a multi-award winning journalist and broadcaster with a special focus on culture, politics, and social change. She won Audio Broadcaster of the Year at the 2020 British Press Guild Awards for her work as a presenter of Front Row on BBC Radio 4 and her podcast How I Found My Voice.

Susie Alegre

Susie Alegre is an international lawyer, author, and speaker. She has worked on some of the most challenging legal and political issues of our time, including: human rights and security; combatting corruption in the developing world; protecting human rights at borders; the human rights impact of climate change on small island states; and privacy, cybersecurity, disinformation, data protection, and neurotech. Her experience includes both judicial, and oversight roles in the UK and internationally.

She has particular expertise on tech ethics and neuroscience through the lens of human rights, bringing both legal skills and a background in philosophy to the key ethical questions of our time.

Her book Freedom to Think: The Long Struggle to Liberate our Minds, argues that only by recasting our human rights for the digital age can we safeguard our future, has been chosen as one of the Financial Times’ Best Summer Books of 2022, and is longlisted for the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.

Sarah Chaney

Dr Sarah Chaney is an honorary research fellow at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. She spent her teens and twenties furiously rebelling against the mainstream, while secretly longing to be normal. It wasn’t until she passed 30 that she (mostly) stopped worrying about this mythical ideal. Alongside her research work she runs the public exhibitions and events programme at the Royal College of Nursing. Her most recent book Am I Normal?: The 200-Year Search for Normal People (And Why They Don’t Exist) was published in 2022. She has also written on the history of self-injury, Psyche on the Skin (2017).

Robin Dunbar

Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and an elected Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. He has been awarded the Osman Hill Medal and the Huxley Medal. His popular science books include The Human Story, How Many Friends Does One Person Need?, and Human Evolution, and, most recently, How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures. They have been translated into a dozen languages.

Chris French

Professor Chris French is the Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a patron of Humanists UK. He has published over 150 articles and chapters covering a wide range of topics. His main current area of research is the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences. He frequently appears on radio and television casting a sceptical eye over paranormal claims. His most recent book is Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience.

Robin Ince

Robin Ince is many things: a comedian, an author, a broadcaster and a populariser of scientific ideas. The Guardian once declared him a ‘becardiganed polymath’ which seems about right.

He is probably best known as the co-host of the Sony Gold Award winning BBC Radio 4 series The Infinite Monkey Cage with Professor Brian Cox. He also co-hosts the podcast Book Shambles with Josie Long, An Uncanny Hour and Science Shambles with Dr Helen Czerski, all three of which are a part of The Cosmic Shambles Network, which he also co-created.

His 2018 book, I’m a Joke and So Are You, was described by Chortle as ‘one of the best books ever written about what it means to be a comedian’.

Emily Kenway

Emily Kenway writes and speaks about thought-provoking social issues. Drawing on a decade-long career working in social justice, from campaigning for living wages to tackling worker exploitation, alongside a MSc with Distinction in Social and Political Theory, she researches and writes about crucial forces shaping our lives and communities.

As a writer of political thought, Emily has been published by the Guardian, Independent, Huffington Post, Times Literary Supplement and more. Her memoir and creative non-fiction writing has been published in several literary magazines. In 2020, Emily was shortlisted for the Alpine Writing Fellowship and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Kate Pickett

Kate Pickett is Professor of Epidemiology, Deputy Director of the Centre for Future Health, and Associate Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, all at the University of York. Kate is a Fellow of the RSA and a Fellow of the UK Faculty of Public Health. She is co-author, with Richard Wilkinson, of the worldwide best-selling The Spirit Level (2009) and The Inner Level (2018). The Spirit Level was awarded Publication of the Year by the Political Studies Association, chosen as one of the Top Ten Books of the Decade by the New Statesman, and one of the top 100 books of the century by the Guardian. She is a co-founder and trustee of The Equality Trust.

Adam Rutherford

Dr Adam Rutherford is a scientist, writer, and broadcaster. He’s a Lecturer in Biology and Society at UCL, and has written and presented award-winning series and programmes for the BBC, including Radio 4’s Start the Week, Inside Science, and The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry with Dr Hannah Fry. He’s written an indefinable number of books including A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, the very humanist Book of Humans, the Sunday Times bestselling How to Argue With a Racist, and, most recently, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics, published in 2022.

Tommy Sheppard MP

Tommy Sheppard has been the MP for Edinburgh East since 2015, representing the Scottish National Party. In May 2022, he was elected Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group, having been a Vice Chair for five years previously.

David Voas

David Voas is Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at the University of Essex, and was formerly Simon Professor of Population Studies at the University of Manchester. He is the national programme director in Great Britain for the European Values Study and co-director of the British Religion in Numbers project, an online centre for British data on religion. He serves on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Sociology and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and on the council of the British Society for Population Studies.

Richard Wilkinson

Richard Wilkinson is Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at University College London and Visiting Professor at the University of York. He wrote The Spirit Level with Kate Pickett, a bestseller now available in 24 languages. It won the 2011 Political Studies Association Publication of the Year Award and the 2010 Bristol Festival of Ideas Prize. He co-founded The Equality Trust (with support from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust). In 2013 Richard received Solidar’s Silver Rose Award and received Community Access Unlimited’s ‘Humanitarian of the Year’ Award. The Irish Cancer Society awarded him the 2014 Charles Cully Memorial medal, and he was the 2017 medalist of The Australian Society for Medical Research.