Agora's Board of Trustees
Agora is a charity and is non-party political. We are governed by a board of trustees from both left and right and from different institutional backgrounds.
Acting Chair: Professor Roger Williams, CBE
Roger Williams is Director of the Institute of Hepatology, University College London, and an Honorary Consultant Physician at University College London Hospital. Before joining UCL Professor Williams spent 30 years at King's College Hospital and King's College School of Medicine & Dentistry. During this time he served as Professor of Hepatology and Consultant Physician, Director of the Institute of Liver Studies and Director of Supraregional Services in Liver Transplantation and Acute Liver Failure. He is one of the most highly cited scientists in his field and has over 2,000 publications to date.
Professor Peter Atkins
Peter Atkins is SmithKlineBeecham Fellow and Professor of Chemistry in the University of Oxford. He is a fellow and currently Acting President of Lincoln College. His principal activity is writing textbooks on chemistry, which have a global market, and books on science for the general public. In his spare time he is deeply involved in a variety of international activities, including (until the end of 2005) chairing the Committee on Chemistry Education of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, which aims to improve chemical education worldwide, especially in developing countries. He also helps to organize the Malta series of conferences, which bring together chemists from rival countries in the Middle East.
Professor Susan Bassnett
Susan Bassnett is Pro Vice Chancellor and Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at The University of Warwick, which she founded in the 1980s. She was educated in several European countries, which gave her experience of diverse languages and cultures, and began her academic career in Italy, lecturing in universities around the world, arriving at Warwick via the United States. She is the author of over twenty books. Her Translation Studies, which first appeared in 1980, has remained consistently in print and has become the most important textbook around the world in the expanding field of Translation Studies. Besides her academic research she is a regular contributor to several national newspapers and she writes poetry.
Professor Lord Bhattacharyya of Moseley
Kumar Bhattacharyya is a Labour member of the House of Lords and Professor of Manufacturing and Director of the Warwick Manufacturing Group at the University of Warwick. He is an adviser to many companies and governments across the world on matters of industrial policy and strategy, and holds honorary professorships in many countries. In 2002 he was awarded the Padma Bhusan by the President of India for services to science, technology and industry. He was awarded a knighthood for services to higher education and industry in 2003, and became a Labour peer in 2004.
Professor Jeremy Black, MBE
Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is author of over seventy books, and an expert on eighteenth century British politics and international relations. He graduated from Queens' College, Cambridge, with a starred first and then did postgraduate work at Oxford. He held a chair in history at Durham before moving to Exeter in 1996. He has lectured extensively in Australasia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the USA. He is one of the founding trustees of Agora.
Lord Bradbury
John Bradbury started out as an aeronautical engineer before switching to the world of marketing. He held a number of senior positions in the industry culimating in the position of Executive Vice President and board member of McCann Erickson, one of the largest global marketing communications companies in the world, based in New York. At one stage he supervised the HR and recruitment operations of the group which led to his interest in the field of education.A Conservative, Lord Bradbury was a member of a Tory political education think tank during Iain Duncan Smith's leadership, and is chairman of the governing body of Perrott Hill school in Somerset.
Professor Diana Green
Diana Green has been Vice Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University since 1998, after a varied career in business and academia. She was Head of Department, Director of Academic Planning and Pro Vice-Chancellor at the University of Central England prior to joining Sheffield Hallam. Professor Green is an expert on economic change, and for five years she was a consultant to the UK Department of Trade and Industry in this field. She established an international reputation for her work on quality management in HE and pioneered student-centred performance indicators. She is a leading member of Universities UK and has served on numerous HE committees and boards. She is currently a member of the Board and Audit Committee of the Leadership Foundation and a member of the Council of the All Party Parliamentary University Group, among others.
Dr Kieron O'Hara
Kieron O'Hara is a senior research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and a fellow of the Web Science Research Initiative. He researches into the politics, philosophy and epistemology of technology. His books, including: Plato and the Internet and Trust: From Socrates to Spin bring together philosophy, psychology, cybernetics and artificial intelligence. He has also authored popular political books, including After Blair: Conservatism Beyond Thatcher, and After Blair: David Cameron and the Conservative Tradition.
Baroness Sharp of Guildford
Margaret Sharp is a Liberal Democrat member of the House of Lords and speaks for her party on issues of education, science, and technology. A Cambridge-educated economist, her career has spanned both academic and public service, starting in the civil service but then following this with a long spell at LSE, a short spell back in public service with the National Economic Development Office in the late 1970s and, since the early 1980s, with the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex. She retired from the University of Sussex in 1999 but retains a visiting fellowship. On the national scene she has played an active part in policy making, chairing a number of policy working groups and acting as vice-chair to Paddy Ashdown on the Party's main policy committee.
Professor Sir David Watson
David Watson is Professor of Higher Education Management at the Institute of Education, University of London, where he is also Course Director for the MBA in Higher Education Management. A historian, he was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Brighton between 1990 and 2005. He has played a key role in the development of Higher Education, sitting on numerous influential boards, committees and review groups. To name but a few he was a member of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation's National Commission on Education, of the Dearing Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, and of the Roberts Review of Research Assessment. He was knighted in 1998 for services to higher education.
Director: Anna Fazackerley
Anna Fazackerley is the Director of Agora. Her background is in journalism, and she has spent much of her career writing about higher education and science. She was a reporter on The Times Higher Education Supplement for three-and-a-half years, covering science policy and then the political background to higher education. She has also written for The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Scientist, among others.