Bohm was one of the most important theoretical physicists of the 20th century and contributed innovative and unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. It was said that Einstein called him his “spiritual son”.

He was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck in 1961, where he remained until he retired in 1987. Bohm laid the foundations for the modern understanding of plasma, the gas of ions and electrons, and developed a mathematical formula to explain how, as free particles, electrons could coordinate their movements. He argued that quantum theory predicted “entanglement”: two entangled particles appear to have a “direct interaction between them” irrespective of their distance apart.

An early systems thinker, Bohm blamed fragmented thinking about the problems of the environment for the “destruction of forests and agricultural lands”, deserts, and “the melting of the ice caps”. He lamented the fact that too many scientists believed that the solution could be found only in the study of ecology. He died too soon (in 1992) to be recognised for the Nobel Prize in physics.

An outspoken pacifist during the interwar years, C. E. M. Joad was head of the Department of Philosophy and Psychology at Birkbeck during the 1930s.

While at Birkbeck, Joad played a leading role in The King and Country debate. The motion, debated on Thursday 9 February 1933, was “that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.”  His ardent pacifism resulted in political controversy, and he became unpopular with many who were trying to encourage men to enlist as soldiers to fight for their country.

Joad was also involved in the National Peace Council, which he chaired, 1937–38. With his two books, Guide to Modern Thought and Guide to Philosophy, he became a well-known figure. He also appeared on The Brains Trust, a BBC Radio wartime discussion programme.

Costas Douzinas LLB (Athens) LLM PhD (London) is a Professor of Law and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Costas joined the Department in 1992 and was Head of Department from 1996 to 2002. Costas was educated in Athens during the Colonels’ dictatorship where he joined the student resistance. He left Greece in 1974 and continued his studies in London, where he received his Master’s in Law and PhD degrees from LSE and, in Strasbourg, where he received the degree for teachers of Human Rights. He taught at Middlesex, Lancaster and Birkbeck where he was appointed in 1992 as a member of the team which established the Birkbeck School of Law.

Costas has argued that the human rights as enacted in law do nothing to tie ethics to justice. As he expressed it in The End of Human Rights (2000), “a law without justice is a body without a soul and a legal education that teaches rules without spirit is intellectually barren and morally bankrupt”.

The eminent statistician, economist and champion of the arts and sciences, Claus Moser was a Governor and later Fellow of Birkbeck, and a strong supporter of the College. In recent years he took a keen interest in the work of the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism (now the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism), based at Birkbeck.

Claus and his family moved to the UK from Germany in 1936 to flee persecution from the Nazis. He had been offered a place at the London School of Economics when, in 1940 he, his father and brother were interned for three months as enemy aliens. Most of their fellow internees were cultured German or Austrian refugees from Nazism.

Claus Moser became an assistant to a professor of mathematics who spent his time conducting a survey of the inmates, and it was from this that his love of statistics was born. After being released and serving in the Royal Air Force, he began his academic career at the London School of Economics, going on to specialize in social statistics.

Lord Moser was made a Knight Commander of the Bath (KCB) in 1973 and a life peer in 2001.

Chris Giles is the FT’s economics commentator. He writes a fortnightly column and the weekly newsletter, Chris Giles on Central Banks with a focus on trends in the world economy and in the UK.  Previously, he was economics editor and served as a leader writer.

He won the prestigious Wincott Award for journalism in 2014 and the British Journalism Award’s business journalist of the year prize in the 2012. He has also won the Royal Statistical Society prize for excellence in journalism in both 2008 and 2012.

Before joining the FT in 2000, Chris was an economics correspondent at the BBC. He started his career in research, spending seven years as an economist for the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Chris is a Birkbeck alumnus, having completed his MSc Economics in 1994.

Chris is a restaurateur, Chair of Leukaemia UK and co-founder of the event, Who’s cooking dinner? which brings together the hospitality community and raises vital funds to stop leukaemia devastating lives.

Along with partner Jeremy King, Chris restored and renovated the grade II listed building situated next to the Ritz Hotel in Piccadilly, transforming it into one of London’s most iconic and upscale restaurants, the Wolseley- which he credits as one of his greatest achievements. For forty years, the duo have transformed other well-known restaurants, including The Ivy and Le Caprice into hugely in-demand eateries.

Chris studied for a Certificate of Higher Education in History of Art at Birkbeck in 2010 and speaks of restaurants as vehicles of self-expression: “There’s a certain art in what we do as restaurateurs…Artwork in a restaurant really feeds a person’s senses and contributes to the experience.”

Charles Wesley Hume was elected President of the Birkbeck Student Union in 1913. He began his campaign by calling out proposed regressive changes to the College governing Committee and promoting a change of constitution of Birkbeck as a university rather than a college.

After graduating, he joined the College’s maths department. He also founded the University of London Animal Welfare Society, which held its first meeting in 1926 and took an unsentimental approach to animal wellbeing, accepting veterinarians and animal experimenters into the fold. While this was quite controversial at the time, he advocated the fair treatment of animals in a way that was “dealt with objectively and not sentimentally.”

He later, in 1962-63, gave evidence to the Home Office’s Departmental Committee on Experiments on Animals, which informed the updated Cruelty to Animals Act.

Ingold was one of the most influential mycologists of the twentieth century and president of the British Mycological Society where he organized the first international congress of mycologists. Born in Blackrock, Dublin, Cecil Terence Ingold was awarded a first-class honours in Botany from Queen’s University Belfast in 1926.

In 1944 he was appointed to probably the foremost chair in the UK in the field of mycology at Birkbeck. The Department of Botany had been led to prominence since 1909 by Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, pioneer in fungal genetics, who was made Professor in 1921.

At Birkbeck, Ingold continued to take a major role in the undergraduate teaching and was joined in 1946 by his wartime Leicester student Bryan Plunkett as lecturer, who remained with him permanently thereafter.

Ingold retired from post at Birkbeck in 1972 and is best remembered for his discovery of an entirely new group of fungi – the aquatic hyphomycetes – of which more than 300 species are now recognized.

Caroline has dedicated her career to opening up access to higher education for people who have traditionally not been able to access university. She is a championing voice for tackling injustices that have attempted to prevent the communities Birkbeck serves from fully participating in and reaching their academic potential.

Caroline is the first Director of Access and Engagement at Birkbeck, a department that is truly committed to supporting and honoring Birkbeck’s founding principles. She is an advocate for mature learners within our community at Birkbeck and continuously supports initiatives to bring it to national attention, amongst HEI’s and governing bodies.

Caroline lends her time and expertise to a range of committees and departments at Birkbeck, to support initiatives from the Race Equality Charter, Birkbeck’s work with Trades Unions, to the Sanctuary initiative.

Caroline is a Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature and a co-founder of the award-winning open access journals publishing platform Open Library of Humanities with Professor Martin Eve, which officially launched in September 2015 with a $741,000 3-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

She is known for her advocacy in open access publishing. She is also a Founding and Commissioning Editor of the open access journal of 21st-century literary criticism, Alluvium.

Her research focuses on the utopian imagination in contemporary literature, science fiction, apocalyptic narratives, and Western Marxism.

She joined Birkbeck in September 2013 and was made a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in 2016. Caroline was also elected as Secretary of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies.