James Gillies is head of communication at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He holds a Doctorate in physics from the University of Oxford, and began his research career working at CERN in the mid-1980s. In 1993, he left research to become Head of Science with the British Council in Paris. After managing the Council’s bilateral programme of scientific visits, exchanges, bursaries and cultural events for two years, he returned to CERN in 1995 as a science writer. He has been Head of the Organization’s communication group since 2003, and is co-author of ‘How the Web was Born’, a history of the Internet published in 2000.