University of Bristol

Christopher Morris is an English satirist, writer, director and actor. A former radio DJ, he is best known for anchoring the spoof news and current... affairs television programmes The Day Today and Brass Eye, as well as his frequent engagement with controversial subject matter. In 2010 Morris directed his first feature-length film Four Lions about a group of inept British terrorists. Reception of the film was largely positive and received a respectable box office. Outside his central work, Morris tends to stay out of the public eye and has become one of the more enigmatic figures in British comedy. Morris was born in Bristol and grew up in Cambridgeshire. He was educated at Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit boarding school in Lancashire, and studied zoology at the University of Bristol. He is the brother of theatre director and producer Tom Morris. On graduating, Morris took up a traineeship with BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, where he took advantage of access to editing and recording equipment to create elaborate spoofs and parodies. He also spent time in early 1987 hosting a 2–4pm afternoon show and finally ended up presenting Saturday morning show I.T..
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Jonathan Whitehead is an award winning music composer, born in 1960 in Denton, Lancashire, who is most noted for writing music for television... comedies such as The Day Today, Brass Eye, Black Books, Green Wing, Campus and Nathan Barley. He studied music at the University of Bristol and now lives in London. Darcy Bustle. He sometimes writes under the name "Trellis". His music to Green Wing was nominated for a BAFTA and won the prestigious RTS Award for Best Original Music. A selection of music from the series was recently released on CD under Jonathan's artistic nom de plume, TRELLIS. Serious documentary and drama scores composed by Jonathan include War In Europe and The Clintons' Marriage of Power for MBC, Metropolis , three series of Medics for Granada and Kay Mellor's latest drama series Strictly Confidential for ITV. RTS Craft and Design Award for "Best Original Score" for Green Wing in 2005, and also nominated for a BAFTA.
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Yakir Aharonov is an Israeli physicist specializing in quantum physics. He is a Professor of Theoretical Physics and the James J. Farley Professor... of Natural Philosophy at Chapman University in California. He is also a distinguished professor in Perimeter Institute. He also serves as a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University in Israel. He is president of the IYAR, The Israeli Institute for Advanced Research. His research interests are nonlocal and topological effects in quantum mechanics, quantum field theories and interpretations of quantum mechanics. In 1959, he and David Bohm proposed the Aharonov–Bohm effect for which he co-received the 1998 Wolf Prize. In 1988 Aharonov et al. published their theory of weak measurement, which doesn't disturb the quantum state being observed. This work was motivated by Aharonov's long time quest to experimentally verify his theory that apparently random events in quantum mechanics are caused by events in the future . Verifying a present effect of a future cause requires a measurement, which would ordinarily destroy coherence and ruin the experiment.
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Julia Catherine Donaldson MBE is an English writer and playwright, best known as author of The Gruffalo and other children's books, many illustrated... by Axel Scheffler. Of her 157 published works, 56 are widely available in bookshops. The remaining 101 are intended for school use and include her "Songbirds" phonic reading scheme which is part of the Oxford Reading Tree. Her book The Snail and the Whale was named by Gordon Brown as one of his favourites. She originally wrote songs for children's television, but has concentrated on writing books since one of her songs, A Squash and a Squeeze, was published in 1993. She has also written a number of plays for school drama groups. Donaldson has been appointed Children's Laureate for 2011 to 2013, succeeding Anthony Browne. Donaldson was born in 1948 and brought up in Hampstead, London, with her younger sister, Mary. The family occupied a Victorian three-storey house near Hampstead Heath where the siblings liked to play. Her parents, sister, and their pet cat Geoffrey lived on the ground floor, an aunt and uncle lived on the first floor, and her granny lived on the second floor.
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Sir William Ramsay KCB FRSE FRS was a Scottish chemist who discovered the noble gases and received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904 "in... recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air" . Ramsay was born in Glasgow on 2 October 1852, the son of civil engineer William Ramsay and Catherine, née Robertson. He was a nephew of the geologist Sir Andrew Ramsay. He attended the Glasgow Academy and then continued his education at the University of Glasgow under Thomas Anderson and then went to study in Germany at the University of Tübingen with Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig where his doctoral thesis was entitled Investigations in the Toluic and Nitrotoluic Acids. Ramsay returned to Glasgow as Anderson's assistant at the Anderson College. He was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the University College of Bristol in 1879 and married Margaret Buchanan in 1881. In the same year he became the Principal of University College, Bristol, and somehow managed to combine that with active research both in organic chemistry and on gases.
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Dorothy Mary Hodgkin OM, FRS , née Crowfoot, was a British chemist, credited with the development of protein crystallography. She advanced the... technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three dimensional structures of biomolecules. Among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin that Ernst Boris Chain had previously surmised, and then the structure of vitamin B12, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1969, after 35 years of work and five years after winning the Nobel Prize, Hodgkin was able to decipher the structure of insulin. X-ray crystallography became a widely used tool and was critical in later determining the structures of many biological molecules such as DNA where knowledge of structure is critical to an understanding of function. She is regarded as one of the pioneer scientists in the field of X-ray crystallography studies of biomolecules. Dorothy Mary Crowfoot was born on 12 May 1910 in Cairo, Egypt, to John Winter Crowfoot , archaeologist and classical scholar, and Grace Mary née Hood .
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Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, Hon. RA was a British Conservative politician and statesman known for his... leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century, he served as Prime Minister twice . A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. He is the only British prime minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an Honorary Citizen of the United States. Churchill was born into the aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer; his mother, Jenny Jerome, was an American socialite. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, the Sudan, and the Second Boer War. He gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns. At the forefront of politics for fifty years, he held many political and cabinet positions.
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