Board of Advisors

University Professor and Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in genetics from Columbia University. Ayala has been president and chairman of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and president of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society of the U.S. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and many foreign academies, and has received numerous prizes and honorary degrees. His scientific research focuses on population and evolutionary genetics, including the origin of species, genetic diversity of populations, the origin of malaria, the population structure of parasitic protozoa, and the molecular clock of evolution. He has published more than 1,000 articles and is author or editor of 37 books. Ayala also writes about the interface between religion and science, and on philosophical issues concerning epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of biology. Born in Madrid, Spain, Ayala has lived in the United States since 1961, and became a U.S. citizen in 1971. From 1994 to 2001, he was a member of the U.S. President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. In 2002, Dr. Ayala received the National Medal of Science from President George W. Bush at a White House ceremony. He was awarded the 2010 Templeton Prize.

Director of the Millennium Mathematics Project, professor of mathematical sciences at the University of Cambridge, and Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London (2008-2011). Barrow was Gresham Professor of Astronomy from 2003-7 and is the only person other than Laurence Rooke, in 1657, to hold Gresham chairs in two different subjects. He graduated in mathematics from Durham University and received his doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Oxford, supervised by Dennis Sciama. Barrow held positions at the Universities of Oxford and California at Berkeley before taking up a position at the Astronomy Centre, University of Sussex in 1981. He was professor of astronomy and then director of the Astronomy Centre at the University of Sussex until 1999. Barrow delivered the 1989 Gifford Lectures and is a recipient of the Locker Prize for Astronomy, the 1999 Kelvin Medal of the Royal Glasgow Philosophical Society, the 2002 Premi Ubu for theatre, the 2003 Italgas Prize, the 2005 Lacchini Prize for Astronomy, the 2006 Templeton Prize, the 2008 Faraday Medal of the Royal Society, and honorary degrees from the universities of Hertfordshire, Durham, and Szczecin. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2003, and is also fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is the author of more than 430 scientific papers on gravitation, cosmology and astrophysics, as well as 20 books, translated into 28 languages, which explore many of the wider historical, philosophical and cultural ramifications of developments in astronomy, physics, and mathematics and the author of the award-winning stage play, 'Infinities.'

A social entrepreneur and consultant to foundations and non-profits, Berner is the CEO and co-chairman of Telos, a forum for Christian leaders of international stature from business, finance, science, religion, public policy, the media, the academy, and the arts, committed to renewing public culture. Previously, he was a managing partner and co-founder of SDG Resources, L.P., an oil and gas exploration company with operations in Texas and New Mexico. Berner was also a senior manager of a hedge fund at Credit Suisse First Boston and a partner in a New York law firm. He has served on a number of corporate and charitable boards and is a former Trustee of the John Templeton Foundation. He was educated at Yale, Oxford, and Villanova.

Professor of nanomaterials at Oxford University, Briggs currently holds an EPSRC Professorial Research Fellowship. He studied for his Ph.D. with Professor David Tabor in the physics and chemistry of solids group at the Cavendish Laboratory. He came to the department of materials at Oxford in 1980 to develop applications of acoustic microscopy with Professor Sir Peter Hirsch. Briggs was awarded a Royal Society Research Fellowship in the Physical Sciences, and within two years was appointed to a University Lectureship. With the invention of scanning tunneling microscopy he studied surfaces at ever higher resolution, using elevated temperatures to image oxides and semiconductor quantum dots during growth. Following a sabbatical at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, he became interested in the properties of carbon nanomaterials for quantum computing, and these now constitute the focus of the research in his laboratory. He has led several interdisciplinary projects, with major industrial sponsorship from companies such as BNFL, Toppan, Hitachi, and Hewlett-Packard. He has over 500 publications, the majority in internationally refereed journals. In 2002 EPSRC appointed him Director of the QIP IRC, with a brief to build and coordinate a multidisciplinary team of researchers to address key challenges in Quantum Information Processing. Members of his laboratory have shown that electron and nuclear spins in endohedral fullerene molecules and other materials can be manipulated with exquisite precision, and that the memory time for quantum information can be at least a second. This paves the way for using such materials as components for solid state quantum technologies.