The inventor of the World Wide Web and one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century’, Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a computer scientist and academic whose visionary and innovative work has transformed almost every aspect of our lives.

Having invented the Web in 1989  while working at CERN and subsequently working to ensure it was made freely available to all, Sir Tim is now dedicated to enhancing and protecting the Web’s future. He is a Founding Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, created in 2009, which seeks to ensure the Web serves humanity by establishing it as a global public good and a basic right. He is also Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a global Web standards organization he founded in 1994 to lead the Web to its full potential. In 2012 he co-founded and became President of the Open Data Institute (ODI) which advocates for Open Data in the UK and globally. Sir Tim has advised a number of governments and corporations on open data, Net Neutrality and ongoing digital strategies. A graduate of Oxford University, Sir Tim presently is a Professor at CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (USA) and the University of Oxford (UK.)

Sir Tim has received multiple accolades and honours. These include receiving the 50th anniversary A.M. Turing Award in 2017, the first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering in 2013, Finland’s first Millennium Prize in 2004 and the Japan Prize. He was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth in 2004. In 2001, he was elected to the Royal Society. He has received almost 20 honorary doctorates and is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame. In 2007, Berners-Lee was awarded the UK’s Order of Merit – a personal gift of the monarch that is limited to just 24 living recipients. In 2012, he played a starring role in the opening ceremony for the Olympics, where, in front of an audience of some 900 million, he tweeted: “This is for everyone”.