Speakers

Professor Russell Foster is the Head of Oxford’s Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology, the founder and Director of the Sleep and Circadian Research Institute and is a Fellow of Brasenose College Oxford. His research addresses how circadian rhythms and sleep are generated and regulated and what happens when these systems fail as a result of societal pressures, age and disease.

For his work, Russell was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in 2008, the Royal Society of Biology in 2011 and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2013.  Russell was honoured by being appointed as a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2015 for services to science. He has been a member of the Governing Council of the Royal Society, and he established and led for six years the Royal Society Public Engagement Committee. He was the Chair of the Cheltenham Science Festival for six years, a Trustee of the Science Museum for eight years, and currently Chairs the History of Science Museum in Oxford. Russell has published over 300 scientific papers and received multiple national and international awards, including most recently the “Daylight Prize”.

He has written five popular science books. His fifth for Penguin (Yale University Press in the USA), entitled LifeTime was published in March 2023 and became a bestseller in both hardback and paperback. His new book How Light Gives Us Life, will be published in March 2027.