Queen’s Birthday Honours 2022

I am delighted that my contributions to the general field of energy materials have been honoured in this way. I hope that this recognition highlights how important fundamental science is to performing the underpinning work that will help the world transition to a more sustainable society – and that perhaps it may motivate others here in Cambridge, the UK and more globally.

Around the world millions of people are now routinely interacting with machines using speech and natural language. Cambridge University has been a leader in this technology and I am honoured to receive this award on behalf of the many colleagues and students who have worked with me over the years and collectively contributed to its solution.

I would never have imagined that one day I would be receiving such an award. As a child on free school meals attending one of the worst performing primary schools in the country, my chances of going to Cambridge and becoming a doctor were almost zero and so I am very grateful for the opportunities I have had. I hope this award will inspire children and young people across the country who find themselves in similarly difficult circumstances.

I am completely stunned to have been awarded an OBE. It means a great deal to me as it recognises the importance of physics education and the impact that the Isaac Physics project has made. I feel energised to keep innovating and to do more to raise the profile of physics. I am extremely fortunate to work with highly talented and dedicated people, in particular the late Prof. Mark Warner, an inspirational physicist who co-founded Isaac Physics with me, and Profs. Alastair Beresford and Andrew Rice, whose technological vision for the Isaac platform has encouraged nearly 100 million question attempts by teachers and students thus far.

I am delighted to receive this honour, acknowledging the incredible work taking place across the AI ecosystem. I have been fortunate to work with many inspiring colleagues from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines at Cambridge, Turing, the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation and beyond. I hope I can encourage more people to get involved as we try together to design, develop and deploy trustworthy technologies which benefit individuals and society.

I feel privileged to have been allowed to spend an entire research career on statically-typed functional programming, built around the programming language Haskell and its compiler GHC. Functional programming started as an academic curiosity, but has become a powerful and creative influence on the entire enterprise of programming. I have also been fortunate to contribute to a revolution in our nation's vision for computing education: computing is now seen as a foundational subject like maths and natural science, that all students should learn, rather than a vocational pathway for future software developers.