Jameel Sadik "Jim" Al-Khalili (Arabic: جميل صادق الخليلي; born 20 September 1962)[4] is an Iraqi-British theoretical physicist and science populariser.

[4] After completing (and retaking) his A-levels over three years until 1982,[5] he studied physics at the University of Surrey and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1986.

He stayed on at Surrey to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy degree in nuclear reaction theory, which he obtained in 1989, rather than accepting a job offer from the National Physical Laboratory.

[26] He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to science and public engagement in STEM.

Guests have included David Attenborough, Robert Winston, Brian Cox and Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.

[38] In 2011, Al-Khalili hosted a three-part documentary series on BBC Four entitled Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity.

[39] In 2012, Al-Khalili presented a Horizon special on BBC 2, which examined the latest scientific developments in the quest to discover the Higgs Boson, with preliminary results from the Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN suggesting that the elusive particle does indeed exist.

Al-Khalili is an atheist and a humanist,[48] remarking, "as the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body".

[51] A list of Jim Al-Khalili's peer reviewed research papers can be found on Google Scholar[2] and Scopus.