This year's keynote speeches will be by Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum and Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History; and Alice Roberts, anthropologist and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham.

Nina Simon has been described as a “museum visionary” by Smithsonian Magazine for her audience-centred approach to design. She is the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, where she led an institutional turnaround based on grassroots community participation.

Nina is the best-selling author of The Participatory Museum (2010), The Art of Relevance (2016) and the popular Museum 2.0 blog.

Previously, Nina worked as an independent consultant and exhibition designer with over one hundred museums and cultural centres around the world. Nina began her career at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. She lives off the grid in the Santa Cruz mountains with 14 people, 27 chickens, 5 dogs, and 1 zipline.

Alice Roberts is an anthropologist, author and broadcaster, and Professor of Public Engagement in Science at the University of Birmingham.

She’s been a familiar face on British TV since 2001 when she first appeared on Time Team Live, and has since presented several landmark series including BBC’s The Incredible Human Journey, Are We Still Evolving? and Origins of Us - as well as several Horizon programmes and the long-running Digging for Britain series. She’s written seven popular science books, including The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize in 2015.