who are the nerds?

We do science.
We quite like loud socks.
We like xkcd too.
We voted for Pedro.
We always read the liner notes.
We never read the instructions.
How about you?

Jonathan Webb

Jonathan is a neuroscientist, currently taking a year off from his DPhil at Oxford to work at the Science Media Centre. He sometimes moonlights as an actor and a singer, which has seen him play Sweeney Todd in Sweeney Todd and take a concert of Tom Waits songs to the Edinburgh Fringe. He has sung with Out of the Blue, appeared in a student film, and led teammates Blake and Joe to their televised demise in the second round of BBC4′s Only Connect. Pursuing his love of science chat, he has written for gnome and Bang! among others, and was an editor of the latter. This December he will be one of the panelists on World of Tomorrow, a new science show for BBC 5 Live. When it rains, he misses Adelaide. Sondheim makes him cry, he loves OK Go music videos and is a bit addicted to these hyperlink things. He produces and co-presents the Nerd Alert podcast and also oversees the website. These are his own views and not those of his employers, his supervisors or his mother. Follow @jjbw on Twitter!

Neil Rabinowitz

Neil comes from Perth. He also comes from South Africa. He has more hair than his cat. He co-presents the podcast and writes for the blog. He is good at physics and philosophy and computers and Boggle and auditory neuroscience. He has more hair than his cat. He once made albums and things. Now he mostly makes trouble.

Blake Richards

Blake Aaron Richards, né Grimthorpe the Destroyer of Worlds, is a Canadian DPhil student in neuroscience at Oxford. Having managed to avoid falling into the family business of world eating, Blake is pursuing a career in academia, and is interested in cellular and systems level research on learning and memory. [Blake would never say this about himself, but he recently tonked a ball right out of the science park with this Nature Neuroscience paper.] His undergraduate degree was in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, which thoroughly convinced him that people who talk about “the singularity” are absolutely full of shite. He lives in Oxford with his sexy librarian wife and outside of spending time with her, he spends his time either in the lab or drinking single malt whiskey to ease the existential angst that comes with his convictions. He is on the podcast, except when he’s not, and he writes for the blog too. He is Nerd OT Level VIII.

Joseph Raimondo

Joseph’s middle name is Valentino. Being a bit of nerd he’s no ‘Italian Stallion’, however he is working on attaining full open-sauce crime-fighting superhero status in the near future. This involves perfecting various foliage-related acrobatic manoeuvres and patrolling the streets at night sporting highly visible Ubuntu-branded underwear. Being South African, Joseph is proficient on the vuvuzela and is obsessed with soccer, social justice, StarCraft and blowing things up. When not orchestrating a zergling invasion of Auir, Joseph is officially a medical doctor pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at Oxford. This involves pottering about his basement laboratory tinkering with electrodes, brains, bubbling gases, high-powered lasers and fluorescing jellyfish genes. Maniacal laughter is served as an optional extra. Joe is the man behind the Wallpaper of the Week and he writes for the blog too.

George Duncan-Jones

George has been a scientist for some time, but this is the first biog that he’s ever had to write that wasn’t for a theatre program. Currently in the death throes of a DPhil in the Condensed Matter Physics department, he doesn’t want to give the false impression that there’s any physics involved in what he’s writing; fortunately he’s operating within a broad church and everyone wants their data extraction to be optimised. He did his undergrad at Warwick back when the decade was young and he was a real physicist, but the commitment to showing off onstage has been strong throughout. This led to him crying along with Jonathan to some Sondheim while performing in Sweeney Todd and, eventually, writing this biog. He sometimes writes blog entries when he’s not writing his thesis and he occasionally boosts the physics content of the podcast.

Peter Power

Pete is a microbiologist and he’s already got a PhD. In fact, he’s already done a postdoc at Oxford and this year he’s left science behind to study politics and economics. Expect cynical tales from that fabled, embittered territory known as Beyond Science. He is a long way from home, which is Brisbane. He excels at pub quizzes and punting, which gives away just how long he has been in Oxford. He even does a bit of rowing. He’s almost gone native, except that he still sounds like a Queenslander when he wants to and he doesn’t say ‘flip-flops’ or ‘crisps’. When he tweets, he does it here – and his photography is on Flickr. Pete contributes to the blog and the podcast, as and when his services are required and his frantic undergraduate schedule permits.

Alisa Selimovic

A biomedical engineer by trade, Alisa has only recently realised that her passion for talking science is more than just a symptom of copious hours in the lab. Upon discovering the existence of entire communities of welcoming, like-minded people, she has swiftly embraced the inner geek and progressed from entry-level to intermediate nerd, and is currently in training for the advanced diploma. She is interested in sustainable development, particularly the application of innovative, low-tech solutions to developing-world health-care problems. These interests have led her to get involved with Engineers Without Borders, and she is currently the vice-president of the Oxford branch. As well as blogging for Nerd Alert, she writes and edits for Bang!. She believes in the importance of communicating science to the world, is annoyed about science sensationalism in the media, and thinks that scientists, busy as they are, have a responsibility to ensure the correct interpretation of science by the public.

Róisín McMahon

Róisín is Irish and currently in Canada, making her something of a Nerd Alert foreign correspondent. She has a PhD but decided to take a little sabbatical from academia, so she moved to Vancouver where she is now working for a biotech company helping to sell helpful science stuff to scientists. Ask nicely and she might give you a promotional pen. Róisín is interested in the communication of science in the media and is enraged on a weekly basis by the “science bit” at the back of Grazia magazine. She is hugely proud to have openly come out as a nerd. “When I finally told my parents, they confessed that they had always suspected it to be the case.”

Nicky Dean

Nicky is a condensed matter physicist masquerading as a laser physicist because he thinks that makes him sound more interesting. He’s been in Oxford far longer than is probably good for him, where he whiles away his time trying to control matter with light. Occasionally he gets sent off to a warehouse in Germany to help them wrangle photons into doing useful things in the middle of the night. When not being a science nerd, Nicky is busy indulging the music and film geek within by writing for Hard Up, Hungover & The Bastard Landlord. He can often be found watching the ducks in the park with fellow Nerd George, discussing the fundamental problems of physics and the difficulty of getting a nice cup of tea in the cafeteria.