James Phillips served as Special Adviser to the UK Prime Minister for Science and Technology from 2020 to 2022, where he helped initiate the national COVID-19 rapid testing program and co-created ARIA, a UK government science and technology funding agency. A neuroscientist by training, he studied at Oxford and Cambridge, receiving national prizes for his research on the thalamus, the brain’s central communication hub. He later worked at the Tony Blair Institute on the New National Purpose reports, shaping proposals to place science and technology at the center of UK governance. James is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL and a formal student in the Rinzai Zen tradition.