Sir Alan Wilson FBA FAcSS FRS is Professor of Urban and Regional Systems in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. He is Chair of the Home Office Science Advisory Council and of the Lead Expert Group for the GO-Science Foresight Project on the Future of Cities. He was responsible for the introduction of a number of model building techniques which are now in common use internationally – such as the use of ‘entropy’ in building spatial interaction models – summarised in Entropy in urban and regional modelling. He rigorously deployed accounts’ concepts in demography and economic modelling and is now working with dynamical systems theory to model the evolution of urban structure.  His current research, supported by ESRC and EPSRC grants, is on the evolution of cities and the dynamics of global trade, migration, security and development aid. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds from 1991 to 2004 when he became Director-General for Higher Education in the then DfES. From 2007-2013 he was Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is a Member of Academia Europaea, and a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Social Sciences and of the Royal Society. He was knighted in 2001. His recent books include Knowledge power, published in 2010, The science of cities and regions and his five volume (edited) Urban modelling, both in 2013. Explorations in urban and regional dynamics: a case study in complexity science (with Joel Dearden) will be published by Routledge in 2015.