Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt has been described as ‘one of the most fascinating and important scientists alive today’ (Professor Jim Al-Khalili, ‘The Life Scientific’, BBC Radio 4). He is chairman and co-founder of the Open Data Institute with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the architect of the World Wide Web.

He is principal of Jesus College Oxford and professorial research fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, and a visiting professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

With over 400 publications to his name, he has researched topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, artificial intelligence to the semantic web. He was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of web science and is a director of the Web Science Trust which seeks to advance our understanding of the web and promote the web’s positive impact on society.

In 2009, the British Prime Minister appointed him and Sir Tim Berners-Lee as information advisors to transform access to public sector information. This work led to the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk website that now provides a portal to tens of thousands of datasets.

In May 2010, he was asked by the UK coalition government to join the Public Sector Transparency Board overseeing Open Data releases across the public sector. In April 2011, he became Chair of the UK Government’s midata programme the goal of which was to empower consumers by releasing their data back to them. In 2013, he was knighted for service to science and engineering.