Lord Browne of Madingley

Biography

Lord Browne of Madingley was born in 1948. He holds degrees from Cambridge University and Stanford University, California. He was knighted in 1998, made a life peer in 2001, and has numerous honorary degrees, fellowships and awards.

Lord Browne is Chairman of BeyondNetZero, a climate growth equity venture established in partnership with General Atlantic, Chairman of Windward, a global maritime predictive intelligence company, and Chairman of SparkCognition, and artificial intelligence technology company.

He joined the international energy company BP in 1966 as a university apprentice and served as Group Chief Executive from 1995 to 2007. He led BP through a period of significant growth and transformation, including a merger with Amoco in 1998. His landmark speech at Stanford University in 1997 established BP as a global leader in the way it thought about and sought to address climate change. In 2007, Lord Browne joined Riverstone, where he was co-head of the world’s largest renewable energy private equity fund until 2015. He has been the Chairman of the Advisory Board of Apax Partners LLC (2006-7), non-executive director of Intel (1997-2006), DaimlerChrysler AG (1996-2001), Goldman Sachs (1997-2007) and SmithKline Beecham (1996-1999). He was voted ‘Most Admired CEO’ by Management Today from 1999 -2002.

Lord Browne is independent co-Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology, Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, Chairman of the Francis Crick Institute, and Chairman of the Courtauld Institute of Art. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Academy of Engineering.

He is a past President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, former Chairman of the International Advisory Board of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford University, former Chairman of the Donmar Warehouse, and served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Tate for a decade. From 2010 to 2015 he served as the UK Government first lead Non-Executive Director, working with Secretaries of State to appoint Non-Executive Directors to the board of each government department.

He is the author of five books.