XX. Gottfried von Haberler Conference Guest Speakers: Matt Ridley

Matt Ridley (5 th Viscount Ridley) is a native of UK. He studied Zoology at Magdalen College, Oxford and was awarded his PhD at Oxford University. Currently, Ridley is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He sat in the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021 and served on the Science and Technology Select Committee and the Artificial Intelligence Select Committee. In 1984, Ridley joined The Economist, first as Science editor and later until 1992 as American editor. Ridley wrote a weekly ‘Mind and Matter’ column for The Wall Street Journal and has contributed to The Times since 2013.

He served as founding chairman of the International Center for Life and is currently its honorary life president. Until 2010, he worked as governor of the Ditchley Foundation, and is also on the Executive Advisory Board of the World Minds Foundation. Matt Ridley has written a number of highly popular science books, which have sold well over two million copies, been translated into 32 languages, and won several awards. His many books include The Red Queen (1993), Genome (1999), The Rational Optimist (2010), How Innovation Works (2020), and, most recently Birds, Sex and Beauty (2025). His Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (2021) was co-authored with Alina Chan.