Chris Smith (science communicator)
Chris Smith - "the Naked Scientist" - is a British consultant virologist and a lecturer based at Cambridge University where he is a fellow of Queens' College. He is also a science radio broadcaster and writer, and presents the Naked Scientists, a programme which he founded in 2001, for BBC Radio and other networks internationally, as well as 5 Live Science on BBC Radio 5 Live.
Qualifications
Chris Smith has a Cambridge University medical degree and a PhD in virology. He also gained a First Class Honours degree in neuroscience from University College London. He is a fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists and on the General Medical Council specialist register for medical microbiology and virology, practising as he does as a consultant clinical virologist at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge.Naked Scientists podcast
Launched by Smith in 2001, and distributed as one of the first iTunes podcasts from 2005, it was also the first BBC local and regional programme to be published as a podcast and within its first twelve months it received 2 million programme downloads.In January 2010, Smith's The Naked Scientists group announced on Twitter that, just ahead of the 10th anniversary of the project's launch, the number of downloaded programme episodes had hit 10 million internationally. At a presentation at the 2011 AAAS Meeting in Washington DC, Smith showed that, by February 2011, over 17 million episodes of the Naked Scientists podcast had been downloaded globally. More recently, during a 2014 visit to Perth, Western Australia, where Smith holds a Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Adjunct Professorship at Murdoch University, he announced that the number of downloads exceeds 40 million. Current estimates are that the programme has been downloaded more than 140 million times worldwide.
Other work
In addition to his work with the Naked Scientists, Smith appears live every Friday morning on Australia's ABC Radio National Breakfast with Fran Kelly, supplying an update of the week's leading science news. He has also contributed to Robyn Williams' The Science Show on the same station, and also appears on Johannesburg-based South African station TalkRadio 702 for thirty minutes every Friday morning with a half hour science news round up and listener question phone-in. Between 2011 and 2017 when the programme was discontinued, Radio New Zealand National's This Way Up show, hosted by journalist Simon Morton on Saturdays, also included a Naked Science contribution from Chris; since 2013 BBC Radio Norfolk have been running a Naked Scientists Wednesday teatime science phone-in as part of their Drive Time offering.Until May 2014, Smith provided a weekly 25 minute science round up for BBC Radio 5 Live's Up All Night programme every Monday. This was replaced by the new weekly one-hour 5 live Science programme, which is also produced by Smith and his colleagues and airs on Sunday mornings and sometimes repeated on a Sunday evening.
Smith also founded and presented the first 100 episodes of the Nature Podcast for the journal Nature in 2005. This show was the first example of an international science journal producing an audio programme to supplement its printed content. He has also contributed podcast content for the open access publishing group PLoS, he launched and hosted the Royal Society of Chemistry's "Chemistry World" Podcast for nearly 10 years and, in 2013, launched the monthly eLife Podcast for the open access online journal eLife, which he currently presents.
Smith is a consultant virologist at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge, and Public Understanding of Science Fellow at the Institute of Continuing Education.