Goddard Lectures

The Goddard lectures offer pupils an opportunity to hear from renowned individuals who are experts in their field, aiming to promote a high level of academic and professional engagement from pupils, promoting bright minds, innovative thinking, and gritty determination.

They are named after one of our most distinguished alumni, Professor Peter Goddard, CBE FRS, who remains a good friend to Emanuel School. He is a mathematical physicist who works in string theory and conformal field theory. After Emanuel, he was educated at the University of Cambridge, where he was a professor

Jimmy Wales

We were delighted to welcome Jimmy Wales to deliver our first Goddard Lecture in December 2019. ‘Web celeb’ Jimmy is best known as the co-founder of Wikipedia and was recently named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

The origins of Wikipedia began in March 2000, when Jimmy started Nupedia (“the free encyclopedia”), which was characterised by an extensive peer-review process designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. The project was dubbed “Wikipedia”, and Jimmy laid down the founding principles and content that year, quickly establishing a community of Internet-based contributors.

Mr Wales has spent his working years developing a number of web-based businesses with some important ethical objectives. He is a Fellow of the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and also serves on the Board of Directors of Social Text, a provider of wiki technology to businesses. He has received an honorary doctorate from Knox College of Illinois and was presented with a Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2006.

Years 6, 9 and 10 were fortunate enough to hear his lecture and many were surprised that a man who has achieved so much began his talk by detailing his failures, but he explained how each of them had helped him to grow as a person and contributed to his later success. Pupils were warned not to tie their ego to a business. He also discredited the myth that an entrepreneur has a single successful idea from which all their success follows, claiming rather that each successful idea was the result of gradual improvements made to a series of unsuccessful ideas.

He then warned students that they must be careful when reading and digesting information online, and discussed what made some superior sources of news and information reliable and trustworthy, in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, founding deputy director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences and, until 2004, Master of St John’s College. After serving as Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University from 2004 to 2012, he is now a professor in the Institute’s School of Natural Sciences, where he has kindly and enthusiastically hosted us on recent visits to Lawrenceville School and Princeton.

Mr W Davis (Head of Politics)

before highlighting the pernicious influence of advertising and click bait on the information we are all bombarded with. As the internet becomes even more central to all of our lives, this will no doubt serve all who attended as a useful reminder about the benefits as well as the potential drawbacks of the information and telecommunications revolution. It was a privilege to benefit from Jimmy’s wisdom, clarity, and experience, and we are hugely grateful for his time in visiting and inaugurating the Goddard lecture series.

It was a pleasure to welcome Dhiraj Mukherjee to Emanuel in Autumn 2021 to deliver the third Goddard Lecture. Dhiraj is best know for being a co-founder of the mobile app, ‘Shazam’.

Pupils in the Middle School were hugely grateful to hear from Dhiraj about the decade-long process by which Shazam became an overnight sensation, including the many lessons he learnt along the way. He offered helpful advice for budding entrepreneurs, notably the importance of persistence and determination when faced with challenges (and there will always be challenges!).

He then spoke about how we each have a responsibility to invest sustainably in the future. Students were able to ask questions, ranging from what he learnt from his failures to how technology might make the world a better place in the future. We are hugely grateful to Dhiraj for being so generous with his time.

Yonca Dervisoglu

In January 2020, Years 11 to 13 had the honour of listening to Yonca Dervisoglu, Chief Marketing Officer of Europe, Middle East and Africa for Google.

Yonca has worked at Google for 13 years and oversees teams in over 30 countries. She co-founded Google Arts and Culture and has helped Google open offices in Poland, Turkey, Russia and Greece, co founding the Google Cultural Institute. Her role now has involvement with teams in 35 countries and she oversees everything from hardware to consumer apps to ads platforms.

Yonca has worked on promoting digital skills, patricularly among women and refugees, and is behind the initiative for training three million individuals and businesses in digital skills across Europe and Africa — for which Google received an award from the European Commission. Prior to Google, she spent fours year at Yahoo! and nearly a decade at Unilever. She also is a Non-Executive Director of the Heineken Supervisory Board, a member of the Global Leadership Council for The Brookings Institution, a member of the Digital Advisory Board to the Natural History Museum, a member of the Accelerate Her Advisory Board of Founders Forum, and a fellow of the Marketing Society.

Mark Miodownik

In Autumn 2021, we were delighted to hear from Old Emanuel, Mark Miodownik, a materials scientist known for his broadcasting and outreach work. Professor Miodownik spoke with great enthusiasm about the way in which the human relationship has changed with materials over time.

Mark received his PhD in turbine jet engine alloys from Oxford University, and, for over a decade, has championed materials research that links the arts and humanities to medicine, engineering and materials science. This culminated in the establishment of the UCL Institute of Making, where he is Director and runs the research programme.

Mark regularly gives talks on engineering and science to TV, radio, festivals, and school audiences. He delivered the 2010 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, writes a column for The Observer, and presents science programmes on TV. He won the Royal Academy of Engineering Rooke Medal, and was awarded the Royal

Yonca spoke about how she has achieved success. She drew particular attention to the idea that if you are working in an area you are passionate about, hard work will always feel easier. She also answered some challenging questions with good humour on topics as varied as the necessity for positive discrimination to allow women to achieve greater parity in professional environments, the concern over large technology companies and their access to our data, and the challenges of running a multi-national company. This was not a talk to miss!