Timandra Harkness

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Timandra Harkness is a British writer, presenter and comedian who makes science accessible and entertaining. She writes for BBC Science Focus and The Daily Telegraph and is the author of Big Data: Does Size Matter? Her second book, Technology is Not the Problem, was published in 2024. She co-writes and performs science-themed comedy with her mother Linda Cotterill and with Matt Parker, and has appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with shows such as No Future in Eternity, Your Days are Numbered, and Take a Risk. Since 2016 she has chaired the Data Debate, a series about big data and its impact on society, in partnership with the Alan Turing Institute and the British Library.

Harkness is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society and a visiting fellow at the University of Winchester’s Centre for Information Rights. She holds a BA in Film and Drama from Bulmershe College and a BSc in Mathematics & Statistics from the Open University (2017), and began an MA in Philosophy at Birkbeck College in 2021, completing it in 2023. Her work for BBC Radio 4 includes plays, documentaries and the FutureProofing series, and she has written about technology, statistics and motorcycles for various outlets. She was elected to the RSS Council in 2024 and became editor of the Significance magazine that year.