Lucy Cooke will be our compère for the evening.

Lucy Cooke is a National Geographic explorer; award-winning producer, presenter and journalist; NY Times best-selling author and blogger with a background in zoology.

‘Lucy Cooke is an exciting new face for the channel, bringing a unique wit and insatiable curiosity to natural history programming. Lucy invites us all to think about the natural world in new and surprising ways you haven't thought of before’

Charlotte Moore, controller BBC1

Lucy’s TV shows, books and writing aim to both educate and entertain; sharing her sense of wonder for the natural world through insightful stories told with warmth and humour. Her work embraces new media platforms and innovative cross-genre story-telling to breathe new life and bring new audiences to classic natural history content.

As a presenter Lucy’s latest primetime BBC 1 series, Talk to the Animals sees her travel the world meeting experts in animal communication and take part in field experiments that reveal what animals are really talking about. The two part series will air in early 2014.

As a writer-producer-director Lucy’s most recent hit Meet the Sloths, a one-hour documentary based on her original idea for Animal Planet, has won a series of awards including the prestigious Panda award for best popular documentary at Wildscreen 2012.

Meet the Sloths rated 7 times the slot average and Lucy’s production company Pink Tree Frog Productions has subsequently co-produced an 8 part Meet the Sloths series, which airs globally on Animal Planet in November 2013.

Lucy’s first book, A Little Book of Sloth, published in the US by Simon and Schuster in spring 2013, is a New York Times best-seller with rave reviews including a prestigious starred review in Publishers Weekly.

"Cooke writes with a firm sense of authority and a loving irreverence that lifts these pages far above most
real-life animal books’

Publishers Weekly, *Starred* Review

A Little Book of Sloth has sold in Brazil and Germany and will be published by Hachette books in the UK in Spring 2014. Lucy is currently writing her first fiction.

Lucy was lucky to be one of Richard Dawkins personal students at New College Oxford where she specialised in animal behaviour, genetics and her great passion, evolution.

Lucy’s entertainment education was provided by working on series of award-winning British comedy shows with some of the countries brightest comic minds including Terry Jones, Jonathan Ross, Vik and Bob, Bill Bailey, Graham Norton, Alan Davies, Clive James, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse.

Lucy has since written, produced and directed award-winning documentaries of all lengths from EMMY nominated series for the BBC (Terry Jones Medieval Lives), to WEBBY award-winning online shorts for VBS (Vice guide to Liberia) to Academy Award nominated cinema feature documentaries (Wasteland).

After years behind the camera, Lucy made her debut as a presenter in 2012, hosting and co-producing her own series, Freaks and Creeps, for National Geographic Wild. The series is based on her own original concept and sees Lucy explore Borneo, Tasmania and South Africa to tell the quirky evolutionary stories behind some of the planet’s most peculiar creatures.

Freaks and Creeps was amongst the top ten highest rating series on Nat Geo Wild in 2012 and won best presenter-led documentary series at Wildtalk festival 2013.

Lucy’s irreverent Amphibian Avenger blog documenting her six month solo mission around South America investigating the amphibian extinction crisis became a ‘a media sensation’ (The Times) and attracted the attention of National Geographic, Huffington Post and TakePart Media all of whom she regularly blogs for.

Lucy has also written features for the Saturday Telegraph magazine, Mail on Sunday Weekend and Guardian. Her work for the Mail on Sunday travel section recently earned her the runner-up LATA travel writer of the year award.

Lucy is dedicated to raising awareness about some of the planet’s less charismatic and misunderstood species. She is the founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society and has produced a series of viral videos about sloths that have had over 30 million views and raised thousands for sloth conservation.

Lucy is keen to experiment with non-linear story-telling and new media platforms. In addition to viral videos she has also produced an Adopt A Sloth App that allows children to care for their own pet baby sloth whilst learning an anti-trafficking message.

Time magazine recently dubbed Lucy’s efforts at promoting sloths ‘more successful than anyone has ever been at anything. Ever.’

In 2012 Lucy was awarded a prestigious National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award for using innovative story-telling and new media platforms to bring conservation stories to a new audience.

Lucy is an accomplished public speaker and her irreverent tales have entertained audiences at the high profile National Geographic explorers symposium, the Idler Academy, Wilderness festival and Port Eliot Literary festival.

"Lucy brilliantly mixes information, gags and personal stories to create a fantastically entertaining and interesting lecture. She always played to full houses, too."

Tom Hodgkinson, founder of the Idler Academy.

Lucy also lectures on conservation issues for high profile corporate and third sector clients including ZSL, Synchronicity Earth Foundation, IUCN and Sustainability 50.

Ewan Birney is our keynote speaker

Dr Birney is one of the founders of the Ensembl genome browser. Together with Dr Rolf Apweiler, he has strategic responsibility and oversight for bioinformatics services at EMBL-EBI. Dr Birney played a vital role in annotating the genome sequences of the human, mouse, chicken and several other organisms; this work has had a profound impact on our understanding of genomic biology. He led the analysis group for the ENCODE project, which is defining functional elements in the human genome. Ewan’s main areas of research include functional genomics, assembly algorithms, statistical methods to analyse genomic information (in particular information associated with individual differences) and compression of sequence information. He completed his PhD at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute with Richard Durbin, and worked in the laboratories of leading scientists Adrian Krainer, Toby Gibson and Iain Campbell. Ewan has received a number of prestigious awards including the 2003 Francis Crick Award from the Royal Society, the 2005 Overton Prize from the International Society for Computational Biology and the 2005 Benjamin Franklin Award for contributions in Open Source Bioinformatics.

www.ebi.ac.uk/about/people/ewan-birney

Martyn Harrow

Martyn has extensive strategic experience in both public and private sectors. Before taking up his position as head of Jisc in February 2012, he was director of information services at Cardiff University where he was responsible not only for IT but also the university’s library service, media centre and high performance computing. Previous to that role, Martyn led ICT for global companies within Unilever and ICI. At various times he was responsible for IT across the USA, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia while based in the UK and the Netherlands. He also has experience in local government, having held a senior role at Avon County Council.

Martyn holds a degree in maths with statistics and computing from the University of Bath, and is a member of various professional societies including the British Computer Society and the Institute of Management Services. He also sits on the Universities Modernisation Fund cloud advisory group.

Tim Marshall

Tim is Chief Executive Officer of Janet and leads the senior management team. After holding senior management positions in the BBC, Tim became Senior-Vice President at the Walt Disney Company and Managing Director at Buena Vista Productions International and in 2000 Tim joined new start-up Wide Learning as Chief Operating Officer. He joined Janet, then UKERNA, in 2005. Tim’s specialist interest is developing best commercial practice in the public sector, particularly excellent customer service and effective development processes which efficiently deliver new products and service. Tim has been seconded to the Athens, Beijing and London Olympics broadcasting organisations to support international production quality control. His charitable work includes producing the Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall each year. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Member of the British Computer Society and Royal Television Society and a Liveryman in the Worshipful Company of Constructors.