Calling Dr Jones

Playbook speaks with ‘the brains behind the brains’ of government R&D policy

From time to time, unsuspecting scholars are plucked from the relative obscurity of their laboratories and thrust into the limelight because some politician or other has picked up on their ideas and placed them front and centre of their thinking.

The latest “scientist of the moment”—from a UK political perspective, at least—is Richard Jones, professor of physics at the University of Sheffield. Why? Because his work has caught the attention of Dominic Cummings, potentially the architect of the next government’s science, research and innovation policy.