Three New Trustees Appointed to the Royal Museums Greenwich
The Prime Minister has appointed Dr Fiona Butcher, Professor Julian Dowdeswell and Dr Helen Czerski respectively, as Legal, Academic and Astronomer Trustees of the Royal Museums Greenwich, each for a term of four years starting from 03 September 2018.
Fiona Butcher
Dr Fiona Butcher is the Director of Legal Services and Company Secretary of Trinity College London, an educational charity, where she oversees the provision of legal services and corporate governance to the charity and its group of subsidiaries. Before moving in-house, she worked in the fields of EU and competition law, regulation and compliance at a magic circle firm and at three regulators. She holds law degrees from Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
Dr Butcher has a keen interest in art history and also holds an MA and a PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she specialised in Modern British Art and wrote her doctorate on British Landscape Painting, 1945-1963. In addition, she has worked in the Interpretation Department at Tate Britain and has contributed to a number of art publications.
Julian Dowdeswell
Julian Dowdeswell is a glaciologist, working on the form and flow of glaciers and ice caps and their response to climate change, and the links between former ice sheets and the marine geological record, using a variety of satellite, airborne and shipborne geophysical tools. In a career of over 30 years, he has has taught in the Universities of Aberystwyth, Bristol and Cambridge. Since 2002, he has been Director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, including its Polar Museum, and Professor of Physical Geography in Cambridge University, and is Brian Buckley Fellow in Polar Science at Jesus College. He was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by Cambridge University in 2016.
Julian graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1980, and studied for a Masters Degree at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research in the University of Colorado and for a Ph.D. in the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. He has worked, on the ice and from aircraft, in Antarctica and many parts of the Arctic, including Greenland, Svalbard, Iceland and the Russian and Canadian Arctic archipelagos. He has also undertaken many periods of work on icebreaking research vessels in the Norwegian-Greenland Sea, in the fjords and on the continental shelves of Svalbard and Greenland, and around Antarctica. He has also represented the UK on the councils of both the International Arctic Science Committee (IASC) and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and is a past chair of the UK National Committee on Antarctic Research.
Julian was awarded the Polar Medal by Her Majesty the Queen for ‘outstanding contributions to glacier geophysics’ and has also received the Founder’s Gold Medal (2008) from the Royal Geographical Society. In 2011 he was awarded the Louis Agassiz Medal by the European Geosciences Union and, in 2014, he was received the IASC Medal from the International Arctic Science Committee ‘as a World leader in the field of Arctic glaciology and for his outreach and communication activities which have been instrumental for public understanding of Arctic change’. He was recently elected a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and was awarded the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society of London earlier this year. Julian has also spoken recently on polar environmental change at the World Economic Forum in Davos and represented the UK at a White House meeting on the Arctic.
Helen Czerski
Dr Helen Czerski is an ocean physicist based in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University College London. The subject of her research is the production of bubbles by breaking waves on the open ocean and their influence on surface ocean processes, and she has spend many months working at sea for her research. Helen has been a regular science presenter for the BBC since 2010, and also frequently writes and speaks on both the physics of everyday life and the ocean. She also paddles Pacific outrigger canoes with a club in London, and she has a deep interest in the links between the oceans and human culture.
This appointment has been made in accordance with the Cabinet Office’s Governance Code on Public Appointments. The appointments process is regulated by the Commissioner for Public Appointments. Under the Code, any significant political activity undertaken by an appointee in the last five years must be declared. This is defined as including holding office, public speaking, making a recordable donation, or candidature for election. Fiona, Julian and Helen have declared no such political activity.