Professor Sophie Scott FMedSci FBA is Director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Head of the Speech Communications Group. She did her PhD at UCL between 1990-1993 and worked at for the Medical Research Council between 1993-1998, before returning to UCL to take up a series of Wellcome Trust Fellowships. She was Deputy Director at the ICN from 2014-2019 when she was appointed Director. She studies the neurobiology of human vocal communication, from speech and sound to social interactions and non verbal emotional expressions, such as laughter. She is an accomplished presenter, moderator and host, having given talks at school prize-givings and been a master of ceremonies for a British Science Association dinners. She was the 2017 Royal Institution Christmas Lecturer and she was awarded the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize and lecture in 2021. Sophie has appeared on The One Show (BBC1) and Sunday Brunch (C4) Horizon (BBC2), David Baddiel: Social Media, Anger and Us (BBC2), and she has presented her work on Mary Beard’s Inside Culture Show (BBC2).