The 2026 Cathie Marsh Memorial Lecture turns a statistical lens on one of the defining challenges of our information age: the spread of misinformation and its corrosive effects on public understanding, democratic debate, and trust in evidence. Keynote speaker Professor Sander van der Linden (University of Cambridge), author of Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity, will draw on his influential work on "psychological inoculation" and pre-bunking to show how research on how people process false claims can inform effective countermeasures. Alongside him, Eliot Higgins (Founder and Creative Director of Bellingcat – an independent investigative collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence) will talk about disinformation as a structural/algorithmic issue. Together, they will consider how the statistical community can contribute to this growing threat such as how to develop and evaluate which interventions actually work and to to communicate uncertainty in ways that build rather than erode public trust.

The talks will be followed by an afternoon tea reception kindly sponsored by the National Centre for Social Research.

Jointly organised by the Social Statistics Section of the Royal Statistical Society and the Social Research Association, this event honours Cathie Marsh's commitment to making rigorous quantitative social science serve the public good.