Member biographies

Tom Sleigh is Chair of Goldsmiths Governing Council.

He served a full term as Chair of the Barbican Arts Centre, Europe’s second largest mixed performing arts venues, which is a celebrated institution and architectural icon. His achievements during this time include helping the Barbican navigate the pandemic and securing funding for the first stage of the Barbican Renewal programme to revitalise the Centre for the next generations of creatives.  

Tom sits on the City of London’s Culture, Heritage and Libraries Committee and is an elected Councillor in the Square Mile. He is Chair of Norwich Theatre, the largest group of theatres in the East of England and chairs the SouthBank Employers Group.

Susan qualified as a Doctor at UCL and specialised in histopathology. Throughout her career she has combined clinical work, undergraduate teaching, postgraduate training, senior management and academic leadership. She was first a senior executive and University Council member at St. George's Hospital Medical School before moving to Keele University as Dean of the Faculty of Health and Head of the new Medical School. At Queen Mary, University of London, she was initially Director of the Institute of Health Sciences Education and then (2010-15) Vice Principal for Teaching and Learning with overall responsibility for taught programmes and student experience across the three faculties (Humanities and Social Sciences, Science and Engineering, Medicine and Dentistry). In addition, she had oversight of the QMUL Students’ Union, was a Governor at Draper’s Academy (secondary school) and a Trustee for the educational charity, Centre of the Cell. Susan retired in July 2015.

Separate from her main employment, she was a Board Member of the Human Tissue Authority until April 2016, an auditor for the Quality Assurance Agency, and a member of the Quality Assurance Sub-Committee of the Solicitors’ Regulatory Authority. She has enjoyed living in the Borough of Lewisham since 1979.

Andrew is a marketing and public relations specialist and board level advisor on corporate communications, reputation management and transformation.

During a thirty-year consulting career, mostly with WPP’s Hill & Knowlton Strategies, Andrew has advised governments and major companies in the energy, technology, consumer goods and financial and professional services industries, not-for-profit organisations and academic institutions. He has also advised numerous cities and regional authorities on the use of branding and communications to support economic development.

Andrew’s leadership roles have included Chairman & CEO of Hill & Knowlton Europe, Middle East and Africa from 2004-2009 and he was a peer group member of the Cabinet Office’s 2013-15 review of government communications. He is an MA alumnus of Goldsmiths, a graduate of Reading University, the Inns of Court School of Law and the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in South London. 

Aaron Porter has a portfolio of roles across the higher education sector. He is Associate Director (Governance) for Advance HE, leading a national development programme for governors in the higher education sector as well as providing tailored support to improve governing body effectiveness. He is also the Associate Director of Policy and Engagement for IDP Connect, the largest global student research site. He is the non-executive Chair of the Board of Governance at Nelson College London, a specialist Hospitality and Business College based in East London and non-executive member of the BPP University board. 

Outside of higher education, he serves as a member of the statutory education committee of the General Chiropractic Council (GCC), and the governor of a Church of England state primary school and Whitgift School both in the London Borough of Croydon. A previous President of the National Union of Students (NUS), he has served on a number of boards including UCAS, HEFCE, the Office of the Independent Adjudicator (OIA), the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and the Council of the University of Leicester. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and has a Honorary Doctorate from the University of Leicester for his contribution to the student experience and higher education policy. 

Pam Raynor has a background in finance with experience across several commercial sectors including retail, FMCG, financial services, and media, most recently as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial officer of Conde Nast Publications Ltd.

Originally from Yorkshire, she studied mathematics at University College, London before qualifying as an accountant in the City, with Deloitte.

She left Deloitte to join one of her client companies Harrods as CFO, and has since held senior finance roles in several companies, including Diageo Plc, Legal & General Plc and the HMV Media Group.

As well as her roles in finance, she has experience as COO for IT, legal affairs including contracts, copyright and trademarks, HR, and property, and has for many years acted as a trustee of a number of pension funds.

Pam also played a major role in the setting up of the Conde Nast College of Fashion and Design, which offers both BA and MA degrees as well as short courses.

She is a trustee of the Henry Moore Foundation.

pending appointment of new Member.

Irene Adeyinka has several years’ experience across the health and social care fields, ranging from children and families to adult community mental health services. Irene currently oversees commissioned based recovery services and advises on mental health initiatives in the workplace for a leading Housing Association.

Irene is passionate about helping graduates to succeed in their careers; this led to her setting up The Lost Graduate group, a career service that provides personalised career coaching and workshops for all types of graduates. Irene has a successful track record of coaching graduates into employment, career progression and career changes. Irene predominantly works with graduates from the protected characteristic groups and works closely with organisations and corporate companies to challenge barriers to employment for diverse graduates.

Irene has led and delivered many successful diversity initiatives and campaigns to challenge mental health inequalities and promote diverse recruitment and inclusive practice in organisations.

Philip Stoltzfus is CEO and founder of Thayer Brook, a London based quantitative research company developing systematic trading strategies. He has 38 years’ experience in finance, beginning in banking in 1981 before switching to trading in 1987, then running a major institutional trading department for many years, and finally establishing his own investment management firm in 2005.

Over this period of time he has been an active participant in the evolution of the financial markets in terms of the nature and range of instruments traded, the scale of regulation, and the impact of technology and digitisation on the way in which information is disseminated, the way transactions are executed, and the way investment decisions are actually made.

Outside of finance, he has been deeply involved in higher education through his board memberships at Lebanese American University, based in Beirut, where he has served in multiple functions including Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and was awarded a Doctorate in Humane Letters in June 2019. He serves on the boards of two performing arts companies in the UK, Cheek by Jowl and The Peace and Prosperity Trust.  He graduated from Princeton University in 1979.

Ben Morton Wright was born and raised in South East London, and at the age of eight he was diagnosed as dyslexic. Founding Global Philanthropic in 2002 in Hong Kong, he has supervised the establishment of operations in the UK, Australia, USA and Canada growing the company to the largest of its kind. As Group CEO, Ben has gained recognition as a major gift strategist, an expert in brand and organisational development and structuring international campaigns. He is a specialist in higher education and Asian philanthropy.

Ben has served as senior strategy consultant to many organisations around the world, including the United Nations, and some of the world’s top Universities. He advises a number of private individuals and philanthropists to develop meaningful philanthropic strategies; establishing a range of new organisations and initiatives across the world.

Ben started his career in the new university fundraising sector, at Liverpool John Moores University and then Robert Gordon University. He was later Director of Development for Aberdeen University, undertaking his MBA at the Aberdeen Business School.  He regularly speaks on philanthropic issues and trends around the world and co-authored ‘Talking Philanthropy, Volume 1’  which was published in 2017.  Since 2019, Ben has been a Board Member at DanceEast, an international Dance House based in Suffolk. 

Ronke is a leader and seasoned professional in the healthcare sector.

She has spent the past eight years as a Board Executive Director across various NHS Trusts leading culture change, innovation, quality improvement and business transformation functions that has resulted in improved service outcomes for service users and families.

Prior to her executive director roles, Ronke spent thirteen years of her career in management consultancy working on roles in strategy execution, information technology, performance management, change and programme management within the private and public sector organisations.

She has held senior positions in Hertfordshire Partnership Foundation Trust, Imperial College Health Partners, BUPA, Career Quality Commission (UK), NHS Croydon, NHS Westminster, Barking, Havering, Redbridge NHS Trust, Accenture, PWC and HealthGravitas.

Ronke has a Doctorate in Organisational Change, MBA, MSc in Information Technology and BSc in Economics degrees.

Fiona is an experienced lawyer with over 25 years’ experience with FTSE 100 companies, combining this with roles as professional disciplinary panel member, chair of governors and charity trustee, reflecting her interest in education, open justice, and commitment to public service. Fiona worked as Director of Legal for Sky UK for 17 years, focusing primarily on employment issues, but latterly was responsible for the delivery of legal advice across a range of areas from news and ad sales to property and construction, all contributing to the broadcasting and creation of content.

Moorad Choudhry is an independent non-executive director at Recognise Bank Limited in London and a non-executive director at the Loughborough Building Society. He is Honorary Professor at University of Kent Business School. He was latterly Treasurer, Corporate Banking Division at The Royal Bank of Scotland, having begun his career at the London Stock Exchange in 1989.

Moorad is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment, a Fellow of the London Institute of Banking and Finance, a Fellow of the Global Association of Risk Professionals, a Fellow of the Institute of Directors and a Liveryman at The Worshipful Company of International Bankers. He is author of The Principles of Banking (John Wiley & Sons 2012, 2023).

Moorad was born in Bangladesh and lives in Surrey, England. He was educated at Claremont Fan Court school, the University of Westminster and the University of Reading. He obtained his MBA from Henley Business School and his PhD from Birkbeck, University of London.

Dr Clare McConnell is a privacy and data protection professional with 13+ years’ experience of success in delivering privacy solutions that drive and support business growth and increase consumers’ trust in the use of their personal data. She has particular expertise in leading and scaling global privacy programmes ensuring a privacy by design approach to data processing and compliance with regional, sectoral and jurisdictional regulations.

She has a long-standing commitment to the higher education sector having been an academic at the universities of Bristol and Lancaster, a Trustee and Non-Executive Director of Regent’s University, London, and a member of the University of Bristol’s Ethics of Research Committee. Clare is a qualified solicitor.

Professor Frances Corner OBE is Warden of Goldsmiths, University of London. The first woman to take on the role, Professor Corner is the academic and administrative leader of the College.

She leads the Senior Management Team, which considers major policy issues and oversees the submission of business to Council, Academic Board and Finance and Resources Committee.

The title of Warden is unique in British universities, where the equivalent role is normally known as a Vice-Chancellor. It is a reminder of the founding of the College by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, one of the City of London’s ancient Livery Companies.

Previously Head of the London College of Fashion and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of the Arts London, Professor Corner has more than 25 years’ experience in higher education. She was Head of the Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design at London Metropolitan University (2001-2005) and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Gloucestershire (1998-2001).

Professor Corner has championed sustainability throughout her career and currently chairs the London Higher Sustainability Network, as well as the Green New Deal Group at Goldsmiths. She is also a Co-Chair of the College’s Race Justice Strategy Board.

Professor Corner was awarded an OBE in 2009 for services to widening participation in arts education. She is a Trustee at Centrepoint, the youth homelessness charity.

Kelly is a Legal Advisor in Governance and Legal Services, having joined the department in January 2022. Kelly has worked in the legal profession for over 20 years, in the city and as a consultant, specialising in employment and litigation.  In 2018 Kelly decided to take a career break and joined Goldsmiths as a mature student to study Sociology and Criminology.

Kelly is an Accredited Workplace Mediator and has previously held an elected Governor post within a local primary school. 

Professor Paul Rowlett is Interim Pro Warden (Education and Student Experience).

His academic background is modern languages, and he has published several research articles and monographs on French language and linguistics. Since 2016 he has undertaken consultancy and interim leadership assignments for HE institutions including the University of Warwick, the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art and the University of West London.

David Oswell is Professor of Sociology. Since January 2017, he has been Pro-Warden for Research and Enterprise. He joined Goldsmiths in 2001 and from 2013 to 2016 was Head of the Department of Sociology.

His publications include Television, Childhood and the Home: A History of the Making of the Child Television Audience in Britain ((Oxford, 2002), Culture and Society (Sage, 2006), Cultural Theory: Volumes 1-4 (Sage, 2010), The Agency of Children: From Family to Global Human Rights (Cambridge, 2013), and various journal articles and book chapters.

His current research interests concern the social life and history of children, childhood and children’s rights.

Michael Guggenheim has studied in Zürich and Berlin, and obtained a PhD in Sociology in 2005 from the University of Zürich.  Prior to coming to the UK, Michael worked and researched in Budapest, Vienna, Montreal, and Berlin. Michael has taught both artists at art schools and natural scientists at technical universities, which has informed his understanding of how to teach sociology and how it can be used to intervene in the world. He has always found it important to work and experiment with different media and produce both theoretical texts but also visual and sensory works.

Michael's work thus far has been defined by different yet connected themes relating to the relationship between experts and lay people, the role of objects for this relationship and on methodical and theoretical innovation derived from the combination of science studies with sociological theory. Michael was the lead PI on the ERC-funded project "Organising Disaster: Civil Protection and the Population", which looked at how disaster experts conceive of the population.

Prior to Organising Disaster, Michael worked on change of use of buildings and how materiality and use interrelate. For a PhD, Michael studied environmental experts and how they produce the environment at the intersection of science, politics and the economy. Michael also worked with colleagues Bernd Kräftner and Judith Kröll on an approach that they called “incubation” that combines sociology and art. Currently, they are working on a project "In the Event of... Anticipatory and Participatory Politics of Emergency Provision". Previously, Michael was a co-curator of "die wahr/falsch inc.", an exhibition on science and the public in Vienna.

Professor Richard Noble has been Head of the Art Department since 2009. His teaching and research focus on the relation between art and politics, particularly in relation to utopian strategies in contemporary art. He initiated and developed the project to build the CCA at Goldsmiths and is involved in fundraising for the College.

Jamie is a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Computing, where he runs the final year projects in Computer Science and serves as a Senior Tutor.  He is also a visiting researcher at the UCL Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience (ICN), and a guest professor at Keio Media Design (KMD), Keio University, Japan. 

Jamie’s research lies at the intersection of wearable computing, theatre, and psychology, where he uses body-worn sensors to study human behaviour across a range of social situations.  He works on a diverse range of topics including liveness in performance, audiences in theatre, movement synchrony in autism and physiological synchrony in dance.  

Jamie received his PhD in electronics from ETH Zurich, where he developed some of the first uses of multi-modal, wearable sensing for human activity recognition. He continued this work as a Marie Curie Research Fellow in Computing at Lancaster University, and later as a postdoc at DFKI Germany, and UCL. In between these posts, he retrained and worked as an actor.

For further details see www.jamieward.net.

Gamorrah is the current President at Goldsmiths Students' Union.