Scientist, TV Presenter & Writer
Having trained as a zoologist, Sanjida is a knowledgeable presenter of natural history programmes and appears on BBC2’s Nature’s Calendar and Top 40 Nature’s Spectacles. She has also presented BBC1’s Natural History of Great Britain, BBC4’s The British Isles: A User’s Guide and BBC2’s Hands on Nature. Behind the camera Sanjida has produced and directed numerous BBC science programmes, including several for the Horizon series.
As a journalist Sanjida contributes to The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent, BBC Focus and is the TV reviewer for BBC Wildlife magazine. She has also written two novels, Angel Bird and Theory of Mind, which received the Betty Trask award for romantic fiction, as well as two non-fiction books, Mindreading: How we learn to love and lie and, most recently, Sugar: The Grass that Changed the World. She was short-listed for Asian Woman of Achievement in 2004.
Sanjida’s specialist zoological field is primate behaviour. She studied baboons in the Namib Desert before completing a PhD in psychology for which she focused on chimpanzees, and was the first person to devise a test that would look at whether they have Theory of Mind (the ability to understand that another person or animal can think and feel). Her work has been published in books (including her own, Mindreading) and scientific journals.
