Dr Daniel Glaser is one of the country’s most popular neuroscientists. He has presented and contributed to numerous BBC television and radio programmes, and was the first scientist to serve as a judge for the Man Booker Prize. In 2002, he was made the first Scientist in Residence at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. In 2005 he was in the first cohort to receive a Cultural Leadership Award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). Formerly the head of Engaging Science at Wellcome Trust, he is now director of the Science Gallery at King’s College London.

He comes from an unusual academic background having studied maths and then English literature at Cambridge, doing a masters in cognitive science at Sussex University, and graduate work in neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, and postdoctoral work in brain imaging at UCL in London.