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.

After a diverse career involving shark conservation, primate rehabilitation, arts management and more, Alex Gerard began working with Malawian agricultural charity Tiyeni in 2022 to support their mission of eradicating food poverty across Africa.

Alex initially specialised in underwater camerawork while studying for his BA in Photography in Plymouth. He became fascinated with marine science and ecology and then spent the next decade training as a shark behaviourist in Australia and specialising in marine husbandry for aquariums in the UK. But it was in 2010, while site managing a primate protection education centre in Nigeria, that Alex was inspired to return to study and enrolled in Birkbeck’s MSc in Environmental Management.

Tiyeni has trained over 80,000 farmers in ‘zero-tech’ Deep Bed Farming methods that improve soil quality, and thereby crop yield and crop quality. The Malawian Ministry for Agriculture recently certified Tiyeni’s method as the most effective farming technique available in Malawi.

Nobel prize winner Aaron Klug’s research achievements have had a profound impact on the understanding of diseases including Cancer, Polio and Alzheimer’s, with the Lithuanian-born British scientist’s discovery of modular proteins called zinc fingers, inspiring their synthetic design in targeting various conditions.

A research fellowship at Birkbeck, in 1953, and collaboration on vital research with virologist, Rosalind Franklin into proteins and viruses, led to a great advancement in the knowledge of the structure of the Tobacco mosaic virus, the first pathogen to be identified as a virus. That same year, he became director of the Virus Structure Research Group at Birkbeck.

In 1982, Klug was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his investigations of the three-dimensional structure of viruses and other particles and for the development of crystallographic electron microscopy.

Blundell is a Birkbeck Fellow and former Head of the Department of Crystallography (1978).

In 2017 he received the acclaimed Ewald Prize, the most prestigious available in the field of Crystallography, only given once every three years for outstanding contributions to the discipline.

The prize was given to Blundell in recognition of his worldwide leadership in crystallographic innovation, especially at the interface with life sciences. He is perhaps most well-known for his part in determining the structure of insulin with Dorothy Hodgkin and for co-founding Astex, a biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of drugs in oncology.

Blundell’s contributions were recognized by a knighthood in 1997.

Mark Johnson is a pioneering professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience and co-founder of the Birkbeck Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development (CBCD). He has had a wide-ranging impact on the understanding of early brain and behavioral development in infancy and childhood.

Through over 360 papers and 10 books, Mark has explored how specialized functions in the brain emerge and expanded the knowledge of the development of many aspects of basic cognition.

Mark came to Birkbeck in 1997 and founded the Babylab as the first research lab in the CBCD. The CBCD rapidly grew to become a world-leading multi-approach, multi-lab, internationally admired centre for methodological and theoretical innovation in developmental cognitive neuroscience research.

Mark has also trained and mentored generations of developmental researchers whilst at Birkbeck, winning the Association of Psychological Sciences Mentor award in 2019.