IDEA speakers series: Angela Saini

Title: IDEA Speaker Series: A Conversation with Angela Saini

Speaker: Angela Saini

Date and time: Wednesday, November 9th, 2022 – 12-1pm

Location: Virtual (link to zoom)

Host: Kelly Perce (KFPerce@lbl.gov)

"We all have some commitment to the idea of race...we all think about race to some extent…we value our racial heritage, our ethnic heritages, our cultural diversity…we have to be careful about when we conflate those with biological ideas about who we are."

Description: Join the IDEA Office and Global ERG for a conversation with Angela Saini, award-winning science journalist, author, and broadcaster and author of Superior: The Return of Race Science. Although research has repeatedly shown that race is not a scientifically valid concept, it persists throughout the scientific community and continues to influence politics and policies around the world. We’ll talk with Angela about the history of racism in science and scientific institutions and the practices and behaviors of scientific institutions that enabled the codification of these ideas. 

Order Angela’s books from Pegasus Books in Berkeley

About the speaker: Angela Saini is an award-winning science journalist, author, and broadcaster. She presents radio and television programs for BBC, and her writing has appeared across the world, including in New Scientist, Prospect, The Sunday Times, Wired, and National Geographic.

Angela’s latest book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, was published to enormous critical acclaim and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and the Foyles Book of the Year. Her previous work, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, was published in 2017, winning the Physics World Book of the Year.

In 2020, Angela was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect Magazine, and in 2018, she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK. In 2015, she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism gold award for a BBC Radio 4 documentary about birdsong and human language. She has also received a best feature award from the Association of British Science Writers.

Angela has a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University, and a second Masters in Science and Security from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. She is the founder of ‘Challenging Pseudoscience’, at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, an advisory board member of the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, and she sits on the Lancet Covid-19 Commission Task Force on Global Health Diplomacy. Angela has given distinguished and keynote lectures at Yale, Princeton, Oxford, among other notable institutions. In 2019, she was made an Honorary Fellow of the British Science Association.

The event wasn't recorded.