Members of Council

Vice-Chancellor Professor Irene Tracey, CBE, FMedSci, led Merton College 2019–22 and is also Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, a department she led for several years. She was tenured in 2001 to the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics with Tutorial Studentship in Medicine at Christ Church. Additionally, she held the Nuffield Chair in Anaesthetic Sciences for 12 years with a Fellowship at Pembroke College.

She is also President of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS).

Professor Tracey's research on the neuroscience of pain has contributed to a better understanding of pain perception and its relief in the human brain. She has also used neuroimaging to better understand anaesthesia-induced altered states of consciousness. Irene has served and continues to serve academia through her election to the councils of the International Association for the Study of Pain, British Neuroscience Association and Medical Research Council. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to Medical Research by Her Majesty The Queen in 2022.

Professor Tracey completed her undergraduate degree and doctorate at Merton College, Oxford, in biochemistry; her doctoral work focused on early use of magnetic resonance imaging methods to study disease mechanisms.

Professor Tracey held a postdoctoral position at Harvard Medical School, working at the Martinos Centre for Biomedical Imaging, before returning to Oxford in 1997, when she became a founding member and then director for 10 years of the world-leading institution now known as the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. She has won many academic and international prizes throughout her career.

Professor Tracey is married to Professor Myles Allen and they have 3 children.

After graduating from Guy’s Hospital Medical School, Andrew began postgraduate training first in Internal Medicine in London and Brisbane, and then in Anaesthetics & Intensive Care Medicine in London, and Cambridge and Oxford. He was awarded a doctoral training fellowship and undertook this in the Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics, now Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences (NDCN).

On completion he was appointed to a Senior Fellowship in Nuffield Division of Anaesthetics (NDA), a tutorial Fellowship in preclinical Medicine at Wadham, and a part-time consultant post in Oxford University Hospitals (OUH). Since then he has divided his time between clinical practice, research and teaching. His research group works in the area of biomedical engineering, developing mathematical physiological models, novel intravascular sensors and analytical techniques to detect and monitor disordered physiology of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems in the critically ill. It is funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the National Institute of Health Research. Its aim is to translate these new technologies and analytical models into medical devices that can have an impact on patient care.

Caroline Warman is Professor of French Literature and Thought at the University of Oxford and has been a Fellow of Jesus College since 2005. She was President of the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies between 2018-2021 and has published monographs on Sade and Diderot: the latter, The Atheist’s Bible: Diderot’s Éléménts de physiologie, was joint winner of the 2020 R. Gapper Prize for the best book published in the field of French studies in the UK and Ireland.

She has been involved in many collaborative translation projects: she worked with Phoebe von Held and Finn Fordham on a translation of Diderot’s The Nun for performance at Glasgow’s Citizen’s Theatre and with Kate Tunstall on Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew in a multi-media edition by Marian Hobson with music arranged by Pascal Duc. Kate and Caroline also translated and edited a volume of Marian Hobson’s articles – this translation has itself now been translated into Chinese. She led a team of 102 students and tutors translating the anthology put together in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations by the SFEDS (Société française pour l’étude du dix-huitième siècle) – this came out as Tolerance: the Beacon of the Enlightenment in 2016 and led to her winning a Humanities Division Teaching Excellence Award. She translated (all by herself) a selection of novellas by Isabelle de Charrière, The Nobleman and Other Romances, and is currently working on a translation of the Éléments de physiologie. She has appeared a number of times on Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time programme.

She has been Senior Examiner for French FHS, Chair of Examiners for PGT in Modern Languages, and has served as External Examiner for Exeter University and Birkbeck, University of London.

Jeff Tseng is a Professor of Physics and a Tutorial Fellow at St Edmund Hall. He has served as Director of Graduate Studies for Particle Physics, Undergraduate Admissions Coordinator for Physics, and as an elected member of the University's Audit and Scrutiny Committee. His College roles have included Chapel Fellow, Senior Clubs Treasurer, and Dean. His main research interest lies in neutrino physics, in particular those originating in collapsing stars. He is a member of the SNO+ (Canada) and Hyper-Kamiokande (Japan) experiments, the Vera C Rubin Observatory (Chile), and the Supernova Neutrino Early Warning System (SNEWS). He is a past member of the CDF (Fermilab) and ATLAS (CERN) experiments, where the top quark and Higgs boson were co-discovered. He obtained his BS in Physics from Caltech and PhD from The Johns Hopkins University, followed by postdoctoral research at MIT, before joining Oxford.

Michael joined Keble College as its Warden in October 2022.

He is an Infectious Diseases specialist and was the Clinical Director of Infection at the Royal Free Hospital, helping to establish an internationally recognised centre of excellence. Two major events have marked his career. In 2013-16, an unprecedented outbreak of Ebola affected Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. He worked at the centre of the UK response to the West Africa Ebola outbreak and led the clinical team that treated Ebola patients in the UK. In early 2020, the same team treated some of the first COVID-19 patients in the UK.

He has participated in and chaired numerous national and international advisory and guideline committees on dangerous viral infections and served as NHS England Programme Director for High Consequence Infectious Diseases. In 2016, he was knighted for services to the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases.

Hamish Forsyth has spent his entire executive career at Capital Group, one of the most respected global investment management firms, where he is President for Europe and Asia. He brings extensive charity governance experience, which currently includes serving as a trustee of the Royal Academy of Music and of Sir John Soane’s Museum, as well as chairing the Oxford International Song Festival. Hamish read PPE at Trinity College.

Wendy Becker is the Chair of Sony Group Corporation as well as a director of GSK plc.  She has served a variety of corporate, government and not for profit boards since 2008.   She was a long-standing partner of McKinsey and Company in the US and UK and also held a number of leadership roles in life sciences, technology and consumer industries.  At Oxford, she has served on the boards of the Oxford University Press and the Saïd Business School and has sat on many of the University’s committees.  She previously served as Deputy Chairman of Cancer Research UK, Chair of the British Heart Foundation and on the NHS England, Prince’s Trust and Design Museum boards. She studied Economics at Dartmouth College and received an MBA from Stanford University.

Sharmila Nebhrajani is Chairman of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the organisation responsible for assessing the clinical and cost effectiveness of medical innovations in the NHS, and is Non Executive Director at Halma plc, Severn Trent plc, ITV plc and Coutts Bank.

In her executive career she spent 15 years at the BBC, latterly as Chief Operating Officer for BBC Future Media & Technology, and was most recently Chief Executive at Wilton Park, an executive agency of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office convening international dialogues for senior policy makers from around the world. She currently chairs the Audit and Risk Committee for the Sovereign Grant and sits on the board of the Lord Chamberlain’s Committee for the Royal Household.

Sharmila read Medicine at St Anne’s College Oxford, is a World Fellow at the University of Yale since 2007 and a Chartered Accountant. She has served on the boards of the Medical Research Council and the Association of Medical Research Charities and was made an OBE in 2014 for services to medical research.

Monica had an executive career as a solicitor, including as Chair and Senior Partner at Addleshaw Goddard. She is currently Chair of Argenta Private Capital and a non-executive on the boards of Ark Syndicate Limited and Shoosmiths LLP.  Previous non-executive appointments include Chair of Board and Lead Non-Executive Board member of the Crown Prosecution Service, Chair of The Mentoring Foundation and a Non-Executive Director of the Channel 4 Corporation.

Monica’s education was at Pembroke College (BA, Jurisprudence 1987), the Guildford College of Law (1988) and Nottingham Trent University (LLM in Commercial Intellectual Property (2007).

Faculty of Music, Humanities Division

Daniel M. Grimley is Head of Humanities at the University of Oxford and Douglas Algar tutorial fellow at Merton College, having taught previously at the University of Surrey and Nottingham. His research concerns music, landscape, and cultural geography, especially in Scandinavia (Grieg, Sibelius, Carl Nielsen) and England (Elgar, Delius, and Vaughan Williams). He is interested in the ways in which certain landscapes shape our responses to music and sound, and the extent to which our sense of landscape and environment responds to musical or acoustic signals. He has published four monographs, most recently Delius and the Sound of Place (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Sibelius: Life, Music, Silence (Reaktion, 2021), and has edited four further volumes. In 2011, he was Scholar-in-Residence at the Bard Festival, Sibelius and his World, and he has led a Leverhulme International Research Network, ‘Hearing Landscape Critically’, featuring conferences in South Africa and the USA.

Medical Sciences Division

Professor Screaton received his first degree from Cambridge in 1984 before moving to Oxford to complete his medical studies in 1987. He then completed training in general internal medicine and obtained a DPhil from Oxford University in 1998. In 2004, Professor Screaton was appointed to the Chair of Medicine at Imperial College. He returned to Oxford as Head of the Medical Sciences Division in October 2017.  

His research, which has been supported by a series of Fellowships awarded by the MRC and Wellcome Trust, has covered a variety of topics from control of RNA processing and apoptosis to immunology. The current interests of his laboratory revolve around the immunology of infectious diseases with a special interest in dengue haemorrhagic fever and Zika, where his research is currently funded by the Wellcome Trust, with active research collaborations in South-East Asia.

Professor Screaton is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, a member of the Association of Physicians and was made a Founder Senior Investigator in the National Institute for Health Research. He is also a member of the MRC Strategic Board.

Social Sciences Division

St Antony’s College

Professor Power joined the University in 2005 with a joint appointment between the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA). He has previously served as Director of the Latin American Centre and was Head of School at OSGA from 2018 to 2021.

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Professor Power received his PhD from the University of Notre Dame in 1993. He specialises in comparative politics with a regional focus on Latin America, especially Brazil. His research focuses on the institutional design of new democracies with special attention to party systems, electoral process, and comparative legislatures. His recent contributions have analysed so-called coalitional presidentialism, i.e the coexistence of minority executives with multiparty systems in presidential democracies. He has over three decades of fieldwork experience in the Brazilian Congress and has held visiting positions in several Latin American universities.

Proochista Ariana - Nuffield Department of Medicine

Proochista Ariana is the founding director of the Masters in International Health and Tropical Medicine (IHTM) based in the Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health.  She has over 18 years of experience in post graduate teaching at Oxford.  Her commitment to supporting international diversity and opportunities for traditionally under-represented students has led her to raise more than £3.7 million in graduate scholarships.  She continues to support her alumni, representing 56 different countries (69% of which are low or lower-middle income countries), through collaborative projects supporting research capacity development.   

Proochista holds a Masters in International Health from Harvard, a doctorate in International Development from Oxford and a post-graduate diploma in teaching and learning in higher education, also from Oxford.  Upon completing her doctorate Proochista was appointed as Departmental Lecturer in Global Health and Development across the Departments of Public Health and International Development.  She subsequently took on co-directorship of the Masters in Global Health Sciences in the Department of Public Health before she moved to NDM and developed the MSc in International Health and Tropical Medicine.  Proochista also contributes to teacher development across the Medical Science Division and across the Oxford Tropical Network, in Kenya, Vietnam and Thailand and co-leads the Global Health Module on the MSc in Global Healthcare Leadership.

Proochista’s research examines the intersection between processes of development and health with a focus on maternal health, data governance and demand side factors driving antimicrobial resistance. 

Lukasz Bohdan is Director of Assurance at the University of Oxford and serves on Council and its Nominations Committee. Since joining Oxford in 2019, he has also been a member of the Subsidiaries Oversight Committee, the Saïd Business School Finance Committee and a Director of Oxford Saïd Business School Ltd. He is the lead executive for the Audit and Scrutiny Committee, with responsibility for assurance, audit, risk, compliance, cyber security, data protection and organisational resilience across the University.

Lukasz has 25 years’ international experience in strategy and transformation across the public, private and charitable sectors. Before Oxford, he was an Executive Director in the NHS and a Senior Strategy Adviser at the Audit Commission. He began his career with Arthur Andersen in Warsaw and Washington, DC. Lukasz holds master’s degrees in law and diplomacy, an MBA, and the Executive Diploma in Strategy and Innovation from Saïd Business School.

Richard Ovenden is Head of Gardens, Libraries, & Museums (GLAM), a post he holds together with being Bodley’s Librarian (the senior executive officer of the Bodleian Libraries), and is responsible for their strategic oversight.

Richard joined the University of Oxford in 2003 from Edinburgh University, where he was Director of Collections, and has served as Keeper of Special Collections and Deputy Librarian before being appointed Bodley’s Librarian in 2014, and then Head of Gardens, Libraries, & Museums in 2022. He was awarded the OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2019. He is an active researcher, his recent book Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize in 2021. He holds a Professorial Fellowship at Balliol College.

PA: [email protected]

Tel: 01865 277158