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Andrew is a Researcher in Entomology at the Natural History Museum, London. His fascination with insects started in childhood, turning over the stones in his South London garden to reveal 鈥渢he Serengeti in miniature鈥�.
He is committed to public outreach, science education, and the facilitation of descriptive taxonomy using modern techniques. A current priority is the use of high-quality images to inform society at all levels about the importance of parasitoids and other wasps, as well as bees and ants, as ecosystem service providers.

Judith Buchanan is Professor of Film and Literature and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York and Director of Silents Now. She has expertise in the transmission of stories across generations and across media, in Shakespeare performance histories and in silent cinema.

Through the creative work of , she brings back little-known films from the silent era as a source of pleasurable engagement for contemporary audiences in the UK and elsewhere, thereby helping to ensure the preservation and ongoing life of a valuable but threatened part of our heritage.

She is the author of, among other things, Shakespeare on Film and Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse and the editor of The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship. She speaks regularly to public as well as to academic audiences and her voice-overs can be found on the BFI鈥檚 newly released 鈥楶lay On! Shakespeare in Silent Film'.聽

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Born and raised in Canada, John Clark completed degrees at the universities of Western Ontario and Toronto before receiving a DPhil at the University of Oxford. He subsequently held fellowships at Oxford and at the University of Kent, where he was a Wellcome Lecturer in the history of medicine and life sciences.

He is currently a lecturer in the School of History and director of the Institute for Environmental History at the University of St Andrews. His teaching and research focus on the history of science, medicine, and environment; and his publications include . In 2014, he was a visiting senior fellow at The Ohio State University.

Nigel Franks is Professor of Animal Behaviour and Ecology at the University of Bristol. The focus of his research at the university's is on the simple rules of interaction among worker ants that generate complexity and sophistication at the level of the colony.聽Recent studies by the team have begun to demonstrate the algorithmic basis of the self organisation of ant colonies.聽

Ant colonies embody all of the most important aspects of biological organisation. In simple terms they are more than the sum of their parts and they are robust flexible systems that are capable of self repair. The fundamental advantage of ant colonies as experimental biological materials is that they can be quickly taken apart and rapidly and easily put together again. This is the reason why we study ant colonies rather than natural neural networks which exhibit similar capabilities but can be experimentally intractable.
Picture: EXI Photography

Dr Sabine Hauert is a swarm engineer at the and is interested in designing large collective systems that self-organise. Swarm strategies are either inspired from natural collectives such as ant colonies and bird flocks or are automatically designed in simulation using machine learning and crowdsourcing.

It has been used to design swarming nanoparticles for cancer treatment and for deploying large aerial swarms for communication relay.聽She is also working towards using automatic swarm design to understand natural self-organised systems such as those found in the brain or the immune system.