Please join us online for the Alan Turing Lecture 2025 titled 'Cutting Discovery on the Bias - the role of prejudice in learning' by Sandi Toksvig OBE, on Thursday, 8 May at 5.00pm.
All are welcome to join the event online via Zoom. The talk will also be recorded and made available on the College website.
Sandi Toksvig: Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, she was brought up in Europe, Africa and the United States. She began her comedy career at Girton College where she found time to write and perform in the first all-woman show at the Footlights as well as achieve a first-class degree.
Sandi Toksvig is well known to UK audiences as a broadcaster. As a political and women’s rights activist, she was co-founder of the Women’s Equality Party in 2015. Sandi has written stage plays, journalism and over 25 books including fact and fiction for both children and adults. Her latest novel Friends of Dorothy was published in 2024.
She received an OBE for services to broadcasting in the 2014 New Year's Honours.
Sandi was awarded the inaugural Qantabrigian Fellowship for 2023-24, by the LGBTQ+ research programme in University’s Department of Sociology and held a Bye-Fellowship at Christ’s College. Earlier this year she delivered a highly successful Darwin Lecture, Eve's Byte of the Apple.
Cutting Discovery on the Bias - the role of prejudice in learning: With Turing's own sexuality struggles in mind, the lecture will examine how too often academic investigation has been and continues to be hampered or skewed by confirmation bias and socially engineered distortions.
The Alan Turing Lecture, launched in 2017, is given by a leading authority from a key discipline on which Turing's work has had greatest impact. This event has become a highlight in the intellectual and social calendar of the College.
Previous Alan Turing Lectures
Alan Turing Lecture 2024 'AI & Political Responsibility' by Professor Jude Browne, Fellow of King’s College and the Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at University of Cambridge.
Alan Turing Lecture 2023 'The Entscheidungsproblem, revisited.' by Professor Byron Cook, Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL) and VP/Distinguished Scientist at Amazon Web Services.
Alan Turing Lecture 2022 'Charting the Horizons of Artificial Intelligence Research’ by Dr Raia Hadsell, Director of Robotics, Deepmind
2021 Digital Alan Turing Event
Alan Turing Lecture 2021 'Modelling Pattern Formation in Developmental Biology' by Professor Philip Maini FRS, University of Oxford
'Bringing the Polish Cyclometer back to life', with Dr Tim Flack and Hal Evans
