Queen's Now

Viewing archives for Honorary Fellows

Indian-born British restaurateur Asma Khan is a trailblazer in London’s culinary scene and an outspoken activist. Her Michelin Guide restaurant, Darjeeling Express, known for its revolutionary all-female kitchen has become a favourite of Hollywood A-listers while remaining a safe space for women. Through authentic, homestyle food, it has risen to the upper echelons of the food world while staying true to Khan’s commitment to grassroots social and environmental causes. 

In 2024, TIME magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people. She is a chef advocate for the UN World Food Programme and holds honorary fellowships from Queen’s College, Oxford, and King’s College London, where she earned a PhD in British Constitutional Law. 

Khan was the first British chef on Netflix’s Chef’s Table and has appeared on Celebrity MasterChef and Top Chef. Her third cookbook, Monsoon, celebrates seasonal Indian home cooking. In 2025, she will host the 10-episode series ‘Secrets of the Curry Kitchen’ on the Food Network and become the first patron of the Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation, championing food justice. 

Claire Taylor studied Mathematics at Queen’s in the mid-90s under the watchful eyes of Professors Neumann and Edwards, rushing between lectures, tutorials, and various sporting and musical commitments for University and College. She made her debut for the England Women’s Cricket team shortly after graduating and represented her country over 150 times across a 14-year period.

2009 was her annus mirabilis with two world cup wins, two player of the tournament awards, ICC player of the year, Wisden Cricketer of the Year, and an MBE. She remains heavily involved with the game from a governance perspective (MCC, London Spirit and Oxford University).

In her working life, she is a management consultant, working within the UK Higher Education sector for a not-for-profit organisation owned and run by UK universities.

Photo: John Pheasant

Hayaatun is CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation. She chairs the government’s Business Innovation Forum and St Andrews Prize for the Environment, and recently co-chaired with Sir Lewis Hamilton his Commission on Black representation in UK motorsport. She is trustee of EngineeringUK; member of the Made Smarter Commission on Industry 4.0; deputy chair of Festival*UK 2022; and advisory board member for accelerateHER and Lloyd’s Register Foundation. She has been named one of the ‘Inspiring Fifty Women in Tech’ and most influential women in engineering. She has a PhD in Biochemistry, is a Fellow of the IET and Honorary Professor at UCL. She was made CBE for services to International Engineering in 2019.

Venki Ramakrishnan was born and grew up in India where he obtained a degree in physics. At the age of 19, he left for the United States to pursue a PhD in physics, but his interests soon turned to biology. He spent almost three decades in the USA before moving to England in 1999 to work in the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge where he is now a Group Leader. Most of his work has been on central problems in molecular biology, including how genetic information in our DNA is “read” to make the proteins they specify. This process is carried out by the ribosome, an enormous molecular complex of about half a million atoms. He and others determined the precise atomic structure of the ribosome which helped us to understand how it worked. The work also showed how many antibiotics work by blocking bacterial ribosomes, which could help us to design better antibiotics. For this work, he shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. From 2015-2020, Ramakrishnan was president of the Royal Society, one of the oldest scientific organisations in the world. During his term, he developed an interest in broader issues such as science policy and public engagement. 

Ramakrishnan is the author of two books. The first, Gene Machine (2018), is a popular memoir about the quest for the structure of the ribosome. It describes what it was like to be an outsider who found himself in the middle of a race for an important problem, and talks about how science is done, with its mixture of insights and persistence as well as blunders and dead ends. It also takes a very frank look at how scientists behave, with their mixture of competition and collaboration, their egos, insecurities, and jealousies, but also their kindness and generosity. His most recent book, Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality (2024) is about the biology of aging and death. It tries to look beyond the incessant hype to take an unvarnished look at current efforts to attack aging and at the culture and social consequences of efforts to extend lifespan.  

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. Gordon-Reed has won 16 book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family  (2008). She is the author of six books, and editor of two. She was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queen’s College) 2014-2015, and was appointed an Honorary Fellow at Queen’s in 2021.

Gordon-Reed served as the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and is currently president of the Ames Foundation.  Her honours include Fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, and the National Humanities Medal. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy. 

Elizabeth came to the College from New Zealand in 1999 to study Egyptology with Professor John Baines. She rowed for the College’s first eight (winning blades twice), and still misses being out on the water. She was Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, and is now Associate Professor of Egyptology at Oxford and a fellow of St Cross College. Elizabeth specialises in ancient Egyptian self presentation, including biography and graffiti, but has published on a range of topics, from potters to religion. She recently presented the BBC documentary Tutankhamun in Colour, and would love to undertake similar projects for the subject in the future.

Photo: Jane Wynyard

Sir Michael Barber is a world-leading authority on the effectiveness of government. He is currently Adviser to Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, on Effective Delivery and the Foreign Secretary’s Envoy to the Palestinian Authority on Effective Governance.

In 2001, he founded the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit in No 10, Downing Street, which he ran until 2005. From 2017 to 2021 he was the founding Chair of the newly-established Office for Students. From January to July 2021 he assisted the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to set up to deliver his domestic policy priorities following the pandemic. From 2009 to 2018 he visited Pakistan more than 50 times to drive delivery of improved outcomes in the education and health systems of Punjab.

He has been a visiting Professor at the Moscow Higher School of Economics and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Harvard School of Public Health. In 2005, he was knighted for his services to improving government. He is the author of How to Run a Government and Accomplishment: How Ambitious and Challenging Things Get Done.

I was the Provost of the College from 2008 until 2019. Earlier in my career, I had been one of the two Chemistry Fellows from 1984 until 2004. During my Provostship the College completed a number of substantial building projects on the Main Site, made a number of excellent appointments to the Fellowship, greatly strengthened its relationships with Old Members, and recovered well from the effects of the financial crisis of 2008. Whilst Provost I had two spells as the Deputy Chair of the Conference of Colleges, and then took over as Chair, during a period in which the Conference developed substantially. The Conference is the body which attempts to keep the colleges acting in concert and responds on behalf of the collegiate side of the University to formulate policies in response to external and internal challenges. As a consequence of these roles, I was on the University Council for six years and became a pro-vice-Chancellor of the University.

The 1984-2004 period marks the mid-career time during which I really consolidated my scientific research, whilst also attending to the physical chemistry tutorials in the College. I began to develop several computational methods to enable the study of the atomistic structure and dynamics of materials at a realistic level. Some of these strands were quite successful and have resulted in programs which are in use around the world – especially to study and predict the physical properties of ionic materials. These studies took me into several topical application areas including the application of ionic melts in new nuclear technologies, batteries and supercapacitors. I left Oxford in 2004 to take up the Chair of Chemistry at Edinburgh University where I subsequently became the Director of the Centre for Science at Extreme Conditions. My research career continued in the first couple of years as Provost but was subsequently overtaken by other calls on my time.

I attended St Bede’s School in Bradford and did my first degree and DPhil at the University of Sussex, with a highly formative 18-month period at UCLA in between. In 1974 I was fortunate to be offered an academic position at the University of Cambridge before I had finished my doctorate (those were the days!) and remained there, and as a Fellow of Magdalene College, until 1982 when the squeeze on university positions meant that I needed to move on. I went to the Royals Signals and Radar Establishment at Malvern, then the major centre for the development of liquid crystal displays, before the opportunity of the position at Oxford and Queen’s came up through the relaxation of the squeeze on universities.

I am grateful to have retired when I did, before COVID and the attendant crises came along. Amongst other things, I remain a Governor at two schools, and I chair the Evaluation Panel of the Royal Society.

Professor John Sloboda is Emeritus Professor at the Guildhall School, where he was founder of its Institute for Social Impact Research in the Performing Arts.   He is Emeritus Professor at Keele and was a staff member of the School of Psychology at Keele from 1974-2008, where he was Director of its Unit for the Study of Musical Skill and Development, founded in 1991. John is internationally known for his work on the psychology of music and founded Europe’s first MSc course in Music Psychology.

He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and has been President of both the Psychology and General Sections of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as President of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. He served a 3-year term as founding President of www.simm-platform.eu, an international platform for research into the Social Impact of Making Music. He was the recipient of the 1998 British Psychological Society’s Presidents Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge, and in 2004 he was elected to Fellowship of the British Academy. In 2018, he was awarded an OBE for his services to psychology and music.  

In 2003 he co-founded the Iraq Body Count Project, which has become a recognised leader in the emerging field of conflict casualty recording. 

Eric Garcetti is a public servant, diplomat, and strategist. As U.S. Ambassador to India from 2023-2025, he led America’s second-largest diplomatic mission and record expansion of trade, visas, defense, and health cooperation between the world’s two largest democracies.

After 12 years on the Los Angeles City Council, in 2013 Garcetti was elected as the youngest Mayor of Los Angeles and he was re-elected with the widest margin ever recorded.

While mayor, Los Angeles was named the best-run city in America by What Works Cities and Garcetti was named Public Official of the Year by Governing.  Garcetti oversaw record economic growth, implemented bold climate action, won the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games for Los Angeles and left the city with a record budget surplus.

Garcetti is a former naval officer and was awarded the New Frontier Award from the Kennedy Library for embodying President Kennedy’s vision of service.

An expert in energy, mobility, urban planning, technology, and economic development, Garcetti is a senior consultant to cutting-edge companies disrupting the way we move, power, and empower our future.

Garcetti earned a B.A. and M.A. in international relations at Columbia University and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

Sir Brian is now retired after a career in the Diplomatic Service which took him to the United Nations in New York, Singapore, Athens, and NATO in Brussels before two assignments as Ambassador: to Serbia at the time of the Kosovo conflict, and to Zimbabwe during the land disputes of the early 2000s. He was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1997 and was knighted by the Queen in 2003. After leaving the Diplomatic Service he was a member, and later deputy Chair, of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission; a lay member of the Special  Immigration Appeals Commission; and a visiting Director of the Royal College of Defence Studies. 

Sir Brian believes that none of this would have been possible if Queen’s had not offered a path to Oxford – in his case through closed Scholarships – to students from working class backgrounds in Cumberland. This is why he is a strong supporter of the College’s current efforts to encourage applicants from Cumberland, as well as elsewhere, who might otherwise not have the opportunities he enjoyed. 

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