The Wellcome Trust has announced the appointment of Eliza Manningham-Buller as the Trust's Chair-elect. Baroness Manningham-Buller, who is currently a Governor of the Wellcome Trust, will succeed Sir William Castell as Chair when he retires from the role on October 1, 2015. She was appointed following an open recruitment process, and will be the first woman to chair the Wellcome Trust.
Eliza Manningham-Buller was Director-General of the UK Security Service (MI5) between 2002 and 2007, leading the service through significant change. She was made a life peer in 2008, and sits on the cross benches in the House of Lords where she is a member of the Science and Technology Committee. She is a Lady Companion of the Most Noble Order of the Garter and a Dame Commander of the Order of the Bath, and gave the BBC Reith Lectures in 2011.
She is Chair of the Council of Imperial College London, and a non-executive director of Ark Data Centres. She will stand down from both roles in May.
The Wellcome Trust is a global charitable foundation dedicated to improving health. Its investment portfolio, valued at £18 billion at the end of September 2014, provides more than £800 million a year to support bright minds in science, the humanities and the social sciences, as well as education, public engagement and the application of research to medicine.
The Trust's past achievements include funding work to sequence and understand the human genome, research that established front-line drugs for malaria, and Wellcome Collection, the free destination for the incurably curious that explores medicine, life and art.
