A luminary of the Arts who was regularly seen at Birkbeck’s theatre, Arthur Wing Pinero later became one of the most distinguished dramatists and stage directors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pinero first walked into the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution in Southampton Buildings in 1870. Although he signed up to four years of legal classes, his real reason for choosing Birkbeck was its magnificent theatre and unrivalled reputation for dramatic performances. Within only a couple of years, Pinero had won the College’s prize for dramatic technique.

Upon completing his legal training, Pinero accepted a job as actor in the Edinburgh Stock Company, first appearing at the Theatre Royal in Edinburgh in 1874. Two years later, he returned to London with the Lyceum Company. He became a prolific dramatist, producing over fifty dramas, some of which had over 1,000 performances.

Today, Pinero’s plays don’t seem particularly subversive, but at the time they represented a seismic shift in theatrical theme and performance. Pinero’s “new women”, for example, were sexually liberated, politically astute, career-minded and edgy.

Annie Besant left a mark on Birkbeck in the late nineteenth century because the college discriminated against her on the grounds of her radical social politics. Besant had published The Gospel of Atheism in which she said that “ignorance … imagined the supernatural, and knowledge would bring all things within the reason of common sense”.

She was a leading advocate of birth control, a revolutionary idea for the time that made her a target for the authorities: she lost custody of her two children. The Birkbeck Committee, when it learned of who she was, failed to send her a “notice of the public distribution of certificates” and removed her name from their list of successful students. She protested vehemently and, with the backing of the Students’ Union, she won her case for having her name printed in the next syllabus “with an explanation as to its being an omission”.

Annette Karmiloff-Smith was a professorial research fellow at Birkbeck’s Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development. Before moving to Birbeck, she was Head of the Neurocognitive Development Unit at the Institute of Child Health.  She was an expert in developmental disorders, with a particular interest in Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects many parts of the body and also Down’s Syndrome.

Karmiloff-Smith argued against approaches that take a modality-specific approach to developmental disorders – approaches that state, for example, that autism arises because of a failure of the “theory of mind” module, or that children with specific language impairment lack a genetically determined “language module.”

Over forty years of research, she developed a new understanding of how genetic and environmental factors interact to give rise to different outcomes in individuals and said that developmental disorders should not be understood as “normal minus something broken”.

Karmiloff-Smith authored a number of books and academic articles, most notably Beyond Modularity in 1992 and Rethinking Innateness in 1996.

Andrew Bazeley is both a Birkbeck alum and a current student, having received his Master’s in Public Policy and Management in 2011 and presently studying Law. He was a Parliamentary Researcher in the House of Commons and has also led on two key Fawcett Society commissions, on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood and on Women in Local Government, as well as campaigns on equal pay, misogyny hate crime and lobbying for equality law to be fit for the 21st century.

As a Policy, Insight and Public Affairs Manager at the Fawcett Society, the UK’s leading gender equality campaign charity, Andrew has led the organisation’s projects, through from the research stage to parliamentary and stakeholder advocacy.

Before joining Fawcett, he spent three years working in Parliament and four working on policy and research in local government.

Husband and wife Andrew and Kathleen Booth transformed the field of computer science, working at Birkbeck as one of the smallest of the early British computer groups and building some of the first electronic computers, with their pioneering work still evident today.

Their best-known machine, the All-Purpose Electronic Computer, was designed in Birkbeck’s Computer Laboratory between 1947 and 1953. The team also created the ARC (Automatic Relay Computer), the SEC (Simple Electronic Computer), remarkable achievements given the size of the team and the resources it had access to.

Andrew often built the machines and Kathleen programmed them. Kathleen is credited as being one of the first female computer pioneers and built the first assembly language for computer programming; and Andrew’s magnetic storage devices and the multiplication algorithm, pioneered at Birkbeck, form the basis of modern-day computer technology.

Birkbeck’s expertise in computer science traces its roots back to the Computer Laboratory founded by Andrew Booth as a research assistant in J.D. Bernal’s Department of Crystallography.

Amr Sobhy is best known for his digital activist role in the Arab Spring of 2011. He co-created MorsiMeter, an online platform that documented and monitored the performance of Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi. He also co-founded PushBots, an Egypt-based start-up that helps apps garner user engagement through personalised push notifications.

A Chevening scholar, he graduated from Birkbeck in 2015 with a Master’s in Public Policy and Management, focusing on fact-checking trends and impact in his thesis.

He has been named by Forbes as one of the 30 Most Promising Young Entrepreneurs in Africa and by Africa Youth Awards is named one of the Top 100 Influential Young Africans. He was nominated for the Data Journalism Award 2016 and has twice won the World Summit Youth Award.

Alison Stamps graduated in 2007 with a BA Film and Media and now works as a Quality Development Manager with the University of Exeter. She spoke of her experience for Birkbeck’s Part-time Matters campaign in 2013:

“In my early 30s someone told me about Birkbeck, and the experience changed who I am. I took my BA Film and Media over a period of 6 years, going to class between two and three times a week after work. I worked full-time throughout the part-time degree and had to defer my second year to care for my sick mother.

I passed my degree with first class honours, having never written an essay or taken lecture notes before my first class at Birkbeck. My degree gave me confidence and opened doors professionally and I could wax lyrical about Birkbeck and what it did for me. It changed my outlook on life and gave me goals and ambition.

To in any way diminish the part-time study opportunities for potential students within the UK would be potentially catastrophic to a body of students/future students that have so much to give our economy.”

Alfred Russel Wallace was an explorer, collector, naturalist, geographer, anthropologist, political commentator and a Birkbeck alum.

He conceived the revolutionary idea of evolution by natural selection entirely independently of Charles Darwin, though Darwin and his The Origin of Species would overshadow Wallace and it has usually been Darwin’s name alone associated with the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Charles Darwin was impressed with how much Wallace’s theory of natural selection matched his own: ‘He could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as heads of my chapters!’

Unlike Darwin, however, Wallace was a spiritualist and believed that natural selection could not explain the human intellect, and that the human spirit persisted after death.

Alex Pitchford is a solicitor of England and Wales, Head of corporate affairs (London & East of England) at Barclays Bank.

She specializes in financial services, technology policy and government affairs. Earlier in her career, Alex was a human rights lawyer in Colombia, where she’s originally from, and held senior roles in UK charities.

Alex is also a trustee for the Uganda Child Development Fund.