Queen's Now

Viewing archives for Honorary Fellows

I was the Provost of Queen’s from 2019 to 2025.

After reading Natural Sciences at Cambridge, I specialised in geophysics. During my career I have worked extensively on strategy and science in decision-making, including periods at McKinsey & Co and the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit, working in the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence.  I was previously the Director of the UK Government Office for Science.

Before starting at Queen’s, I was the Chief Science Policy Officer at the Royal Society. During my time there, the Society ran significant policy and public programmes on Machine Learning, the governance and ethics of the uses of data, AI narratives and the implications of AI for the future of work, together with a major public lecture series on AI supported by DeepMind.

I am Vice President (Evidence) of the International Network for Government Science Advice, and am leading work to establish a European Chapter of INGSA.

I was awarded a CBE for my part in developing the UK government’s science-based strategic futures programme, Foresight, which provided evidence and insights to decision-makers in areas from flood risk in 2080, to human enhancement, and the future of computer-based trading in financial markets.

I have held Board-level roles at a range of research and teaching institutions, including the Council of King’s College London, where I helped establish King’s Maths School, a university-sponsored Free School for talented 16-19-year-old mathematicians; the University of the West of England; and Newnham College, Cambridge. In 2020, I was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge and in 2021, I was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at the University of Bath.

At Oxford, I was involved with the following University committees: Department of Statistics External Advisory Panel (as a panel member); College Accounts Committee (Chair); and the Ethics in Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council (panel member).

My first book How does government listen to scientists? was published by Palgrave in August 2018. My second book Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning was published by Routledge in 2022. It makes the case for the urgent need to take stories seriously in order to improve public reasoning. Co-authored with Sarah Dillon, we provide a theory and practice for gathering narrative evidence that will complement and strengthen, not distort, other forms of evidence, including that from science.

Book talk: “Storylistening: Narrative Evidence & Public Reasoning” with Claire Craig & Sarah Dillon

Dr Claire Craig Talks About Storylistening And The Power Of Listening

Videos of Public Appearances

Climate change through history: what can we learn? A Green Alliance event chaired by Claire Craig, featuring Professor Geoffrey Parker (Ohio State University) and Professor Kyle Harper (University of Oklahoma), September 2020.

CogX 2020, Global Leadership Summit and Festival of AI & Emerging Technology:

Watch Dr Craig speak at the 2019 Futures Conference: Shaping our Future in Wales.

Selected Publications

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

Dame Hayaatun Sillem is founder and CEO of Argentic Associates, focussed on transforming major philanthropy, and is launching a new podcast on leadership. Until the end of 2025 she was CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. She is a member of the government’s Women in Tech Taskforce, trustee of various charities and NXD at construction company Laing O’Rourke. She previously co-chaired Lewis Hamilton’s Commission on diversity in motorsport and co-founded the Enterprise Hub, a leading deeptech accelerator. 

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 and DBE in June 2026.

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

Lord Michael Barber of Chittlehampton (in Devon, where he lives) was elevated to the House of Lords in January 2026. He is a world-leading authority on the effectiveness of government.  

His book How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don’t go Crazy, published by Penguin in 2016, has been influential among political leaders and officials worldwide.

From 1997 to 2001 he was the Chief Adviser on School Standards to the UK Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, focused on improving literacy and numeracy in primary schools, raising standards and tackling school failure.

In 2001, for Prime Minister, Tony Blair, he founded the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit in No10, Downing Street, which he led until 2005. In this role he was responsible for ensuring delivery of the government’s domestic policy priorities across health, education, crime reduction, criminal justice, transport and immigration. The sustained focus on delivery from the heart of government, and the processes the PMDU developed, were significant innovations, of interest to numerous other countries and major global institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.

From 2005 he was a partner at McKinsey and Company and then Chief Education Advisor at Pearson.

In 2012, he founded, with others, Delivery Associates. With his leadership, Delivery Associates has worked with government leaders across the developing and developed world to enable them to deliver their domestic policy priorities. These include the governments of Albania, Canada, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Peru, Chile, various states in Australia and the mayors of numerous US and Latin American cities including New York City, Medellin and Santiago De Chile. He stood down from Delivery Associates in 2024.

From 2017 to 2021 he was the founding Chair of the newly established Office for Students which regulates the higher education sector in England. He has also advised the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, on skills and the future economy.

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 also worked on economic reform and poverty alleviation with the federal government of Pakistan.

In 2017 he was commissioned by Her Majesty’s Treasury to review efficiency and public value. His report “Delivering better outcomes for citizens: practical steps for unlocking public value” was published with the budget in 2017 and proposed a new way of measuring public value.

During this time, he was also the founding vice-chair of the Education Outcomes Fund, of which Sir Ronald Cohen is the Chair. It has been a leading innovator in impact investing in education in the developing world.

For 2024 he was Adviser to the UK Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, on Effective Delivery and the Foreign Secretary’s Envoy on governance in the Palestinian Authority.

For several years he was a distinguished visiting scholar at Harvard School of Public Health. He is an Honorary Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford. In 2005, he was knighted for his services to improving government. Since he joined the House of Lords in January 2026, he has regularly raised issues relating to productivity, especially in the public sector, and to Devon and the South-West. He is a member of the House of Lords Public Services Committee.

He was Chair of Somerset County Cricket Club for four seasons, standing down in February 2026.  He also co-chaired (with David Fursdon, the Lord Lieutenant of Devon) the Devon Land Use Pilot.

He is currently Chancellor of the University of Exeter and a member of the FA’s Performance Advisory Group.

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.