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Roger Highfield

Roger Highfield is the Science Director at the Science Museum Group, a member of the UK's Medical Research Council and a visiting professor at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, and Department of Chemistry, UCL. He studied Chemistry at the University of Oxford and was the first person to bounce a neutron off a soap bubble. Roger was the Science Editor of The Daily Telegraph for two decades, and the Editor of New Scientist between 2008 and 2011. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, most recently Stephen Hawking: Genius at Work, and has had thousands of articles published in newspapers and magazines.

Roger Highfield, Director of External Affairs, reflects on Benedict Cumberbatch’s recent visit to the Science Museum to prepare for his role as Alan Turing in a new film, The Imitation Game. Book tickets for a special preview screening at the Science Museum’s IMAX next week.

The Chancellor, George Osborne, has announced his ambitions to create a northern “supercity” to rival London as a global hub by building HS3, a high speed rail link between Manchester and Leeds. He was speaking, appropriately enough, at our sister museum, the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, which tells the story of where science met industry to create the modern world and, as the Chancellor himself highlighted, is the site of the world’s oldest surviving passenger railway station. His […]

By Roger Highfield, Director of External Affairs Google today celebrates the life of the Nobel-prize-winning chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) with a Doodle on its homepage. Here you can see the inspiration for the Doodle on what would have been her 104th birthday, her historic image of the three dimensional atomic structure of penicillin, which she deduced with a method called X ray crystallography. Because it was not possible to focus X rays scattered by the penicillin, Hodgkin used large […]