Biography

Lord Ronald Oxburgh
Deputy Chairman, Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC)
House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology, UK

Lord Oxburgh has been appointed Deputy Chairman of the Science and Engineering Research Council, A*STAR, since 1 January 2002. Lord Oxburgh is also member of the International Academic Advisory Panel of Singapore and the Hong Kong University Grants Committee.

He was a non-executive director of Shell Transport & Trading Company PLC, and Chairman of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum from 2003 - Aug 2005.

The Lord Ernest Ronald Oxburgh He has recently been appointed as Chairman of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology Lord Oxburgh graduated from the Universities of Oxford and Princeton, and subsequently taught geology and geophysics at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In Cambridge he was Head of the Department of Earth Sciences from 1980-1988 and President of Queens' College from 1984-89.

He has spent various periods as Visiting Professor at Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology, and Cornell University. Between 1988 and 1993 Lord Oxburgh was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence, and subsequently became Rector of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, until January 2001.

He has been a member of the Natural Environment Research Council, and the Advisory Council for Science and Technology. For three years, since 1994, he chaired the UK Inter-Agency Committee on the Environment and Global Change, and was also a member of the Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust Board.

In 1995-6, Lord Oxburgh served as a member of the National Academies Policy Advisory Group working party on the future of the national research base and also served as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was recently a member of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (the Dearing Committee), and of the North Committee into the future structure of Oxford University.

He was elected to the Royal Society in 1978, and was awarded a life peerage in the Queen's Birthday Honours in June 1999.

Last Updated On 25 September 2009