Speaker Profile: Jonathan Drori

Jon is Director of Changing Media, a consulting company that works with Government and other public bodies to develop creative and business strategy to help them to engage hard-to-reach groups. He is used to operating at Board and Ministerial level, both as an adviser and as a chair and facilitator. Jon is also Director of Changing Media Development, which develops novel interventions for children with cognitive impairments such as autism.

Jon has served on many public committees and has been a non-executive board member and mentor for large public projects, advising on policies, strategies and tactics to encourage innovation, to drive better performance, and to engage new audiences with services that people will actually use. He has worked closely with Ministers in the DCSF, DCLG , BIS and DCMS and has advised Parliament’s public internet project, Local Authorities, The British Library, Wellcome Trust, BBC Trust and NESTA.
 
Until March 2006, Jon was Director of Culture Online at the DCMS - a programme designed to extend the reach of science and the arts to new audiences using new techniques. He recruited and led a creative team of commissioning executives, producers and technologists who won twenty-eight major awards (including four BAFTAs, the National Newspaper Awards, a Webby and the UN World Summit E-Learning Award), as well as citation from the National Audit Office for the management of risk and innovation.
 
Previously Jon was Managing Director of the e-business firm Scient and before that spent eighteen years with the BBC. He was Head of Commissioning and Editorial Director for BBC Online. (He has since worked with the BBC Trust on new media strategy.) Jon was Head of Digital Media and Learning Channels for BBC Education, where he led the development of many new services to engage the public. As a BBC Executive Editor, he was responsible for national numeracy and literacy campaigns and many science, technology and informal learning programmes - more than fifty prime-time series and documentaries which won many international awards. He has since been an occasional Executive Producer for landmark television science series, such as Channel 4’s The DNA Story, which won an Emmy, and The Great Sperm Race, about conception.

Jon is a main-board Trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Culture 24 and The Woodland Trust, Chairman of the H. H. Wingate Foundation and a member of the UK Government’s Taskforce on Digital Inclusion. He is a Fellow of The Linnean Society, Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a full voting-member of BAFTA. He is a frequent public-speaker on aspects of science and the media, including at the international TED conference.

Jon is Visiting Industrial Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Bristol University, specialising in misconceptions in science and in the uses of technology for learning. He was awarded a CBE in the December 2006 New Year Honours.

Prof. Jonathan Drori CBE FLS MIET FRSA