Jonathan Van Tam is an epidemiologist and acted as an independent advisor to the UK Government as one of two Deputy Chief Medical Officers. After graduating in medicine from the University of Nottingham in 1987, Jonathan spent five years practising hospital-based clinical medicine before becoming senior lecturer at the University of Nottingham and regional epidemiologist for the Public Health Laboratory service in 1997. After four years in the pharmaceutical industry he was appointed Consultant Epidemiologist and Head of the Pandemic Influenza Office at the UK Health Protection Agency in 2004. Jonathan was appointed Deputy Chief Medical Officer in October 2017 and led on health protection until March 2022. He was awarded an MBE in 1998, and was knighted in the 2022 New Years Honours for services to public health. This Christmas Lecture was originally broadcast on BBC4 on 28 December 2021

Professor Sophie Scott will take us on a fascinating journey through one of the fundamentals of human and animal life: the unstoppable urge to communicate, in the 2017 CHRISTMAS LECTURES on communication. Lecture One looks at how we gained the remarkable instrument that is the human voice. Sophie will explore how laughter provides a link to our animal past, how our voice box has changed the shape of our faces and why we sound the way we do. In Lecture Two Sophie will explore the hidden code of communication, the more secret and sometimes more sinister side of human interaction – everything we say without opening our mouths – from contagious behaviours to the emotional clues in smell, and whether information wired directly into our brains is really a future we want. And in Lecture Three, Sophie will examine one of the biggest puzzles in science – how and when humans first evolved language – revealing the huge amount of raw brain power and sensory skill needed to understand even a simple sentence and how we convey as much meaning through our tone, pace and pitch of voice as we say with our words. Along the way we’ll feature a modern-day return to classic television moments from past Lectures such as Sir David Attenborough’s ‘The Language of Animals’ from 1973, and may even attempt a world record.

Saiful Islam investigates how to generate energy, without destroying the planet in the process.

Professor Mike Wooldridge tackled the big questions and unravelled the myths of AI research in the 2023 CHRISTMAS LECTURES from the Royal Institution, supported by CGI.

Professor Dame Sue Black DBE is a forensic anthropologist, anatomist and academic and is currently the President of St John’s College Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, having previously been Pro-Vice Chancellor at Lancaster University.

Renowned experimental psychologist Professor Bruce Hood delivers three demonstration-packed lectures entitled Meet Your Brain

In the first of this year's Christmas lectures, Dr Mark Miodownik investigates why size matters in animal behaviour. He reveals how the science of materials - the stuff from which everything is made - can explain some of the most extraordinary and surprising feats in the animal kingdom. Dr Mark Miodownik zooms into the microscopic world beneath our fingertips. In this unfamiliar landscape, strange forces dominate the world and common sense goes out of the window. He reveals how this tiny hidden world can make objects behave like magic, and discovers the secrets of the extraordinary metals that make jet engines possible. In the last of this year's Christmas Lectures, Dr Mark Miodownik investigates the world of the very big and very tall. He reveals that, at this scale, everything is governed by a battle with one of the strangest forces in the universe - gravity.

Dr Peter Wothers unpicks the chemistry of the world around us, looking at air, water and earth - three of the original ancient Greek 'elements' that tantalised alchemists for centuries.