Steven Bishop is a professor of mathematics and has been at UCL since 1984. He has published around 200 academic papers, edited two books and has had appearances on television and radio. His research has covered topics such as chaos theory, reducing vibrations of engineering structures, how sand dunes are formed and games of hide and seek. The main emphasis of his research at the moment is directed towards understanding the implications of Big Data and modelling social systems. In 2013 Steven held a prestigious, ‘Dream’ Fellowship funded by the UK research Council (EPSRC) to allow him to consider creative ways to arrive at scientific narratives. He has been influential in the formation of a European network of physical and social scientists in order to investigate how decision support systems can be developed to assist policy makers and has run conferences in the UK House of Lords and in the European Parliament in Brussels. He has been the Coordinator for EC funded projects (see www.globalsystemdynamics.eu andwww.futurict.eu) and has helped to forge the EC research agenda in global system science (which looks at behaviour of systems that cross policy domains and country borders). Steven has been a co-investigator on projects funded by the UK research council; one recent one on new business models using big data and the other combining models for aid, trade, migration and security. Recent publications include the topics of corruption in the public sector, investigating whether optimism is linked to GDP and modelling of the London riots (see for instance Nature Scientific Reports).