National governments may have less immediate power than they used to but, in matters large and small, someone somewhere often has to make a decision that will affect many lives. The Ministers making those decisions are human too, and what we know about how science works in government can tell us a lot about its place in wider public debates. Making decisions today, based on evidence from the past, in order to change the future: what could possibly go wrong?

Speaker profiles

Dr Claire Craig CBE is Chief Science Policy Officer at the Royal Society. Previously Claire was the Director of the UK Government Office for Science.

Claire has worked extensively on strategy and science in decision-making. Her career includes periods at McKinsey & Co and the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, working in the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence. She was awarded a CBE for her part in developing the UK government’s science-based strategic futures programme, Foresight.

Claire has held Board-level roles at a range of research and teaching institutions. She is also the UK representative on the Governing Body of the EU’s Joint Research Centre. In October 2018 she was pre-Elected as Provost of the Queen’s College, Oxford.

Her first book “How does government listen to scientists?” was published by Palgrave in August 2018.