Professor Anne Trefethen from the University of Oxford, and Professor Jane Hillston from the University of Edinburgh, have been appointed as non-executive Directors and Trustees at The Alan Turing Institute. They take over from Professor Tom Melham and Professor Richard Kenway, who previously represented Oxford and Edinburgh respectively on the Board and have come to the end of their terms of office.
The Board of Trustees is the governing body of the Institute and is made up of both independent members and one nominated trustee from each of our founding members. The Trustees are also the Turing’s directors.
The Turing has implemented significant governance reforms to enhance its role as the UK's National Institute for data science and AI. These reforms, reflected in new Articles of Association and Joint Venture Agreement, improve transparency and enable a more agile operation. The changes directly address recommendations from recent reviews and strengthen the Institute's ability to serve the UK data science and AI community.
Dr Doug Gurr, Chair of Board of Trustees, said: “I’m delighted to welcome Anne and Jane to the Turing’s Board of Trustees. They both bring a wealth of expertise to the Turing and I’m very much looking forward to working closely with them to achieve our ambitious goals.”
About the new Trustees
Professor Anne Trefethen is a Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Professor of Scientific Computing and Fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. She is the Pro-Vice-Chancellor responsible for the Digital Strategy of the University. Prior to becoming a Pro-Vice-Chancellor, she was appointed as the University’s first Chief Information Officer in March 2012.
Trefethen joined the University in 2005 to lead the development of the Oxford e-Research Centre where she served as the Director for over 6 years. Her research has been focused on high-performance numerical algorithms and large-scale scientific applications. She has contributed to the fields of parallel numerical algorithms, software design and engineering together with energy-aware algorithms. In 2001 she became the Deputy Director of the UK e-Science Core Programme working with the Research Councils and DTI (now Innovate UK). She spent ten years in the US at Thinking Machines Inc and as Associate Director at the Theory Centre, Cornell University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
She said: “There couldn’t be a more interesting time to join the Turing’s Board of Trustees. AI offers the opportunity of very different approaches to scientific challenges and is impacting our lives and society more generally in fundamental ways – making a national institute for AI even more critical.”
Professor Jane Hillston is a Professor of Quantitative Modelling, Dean of Research Culture and REF, and former Head of the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. In March 2007 she was elected to the fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 2018, to the membership of the Academia Europaea. She is the recipient of the Suffrage Science Award for Computer Science and the RSE Lord Kelvin Medal. She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2022. Hillston is the first person to receive the three top awards from the British Computer Society – the Needham Award, the Distinguished Dissertation Award and recently the Lovelace Research Medal. She is known for her work on stochastic process algebras. In particular, she developed approaches to quantified verification, such as the PEPA process algebra, which support dynamic behaviour and resource use to be assessed.
Hillston is a strong advocate for equality, diversity, and inclusion and in 2023, she was awarded an MBE for her services to computer science and women in science.
She said: “I am very much looking forward to joining the Board of Trustees and helping to shape the future strategy of the Alan Turing Institute. I’m hugely excited to be part of the Turing’s next phase, which aims to address some of society’s most pressing issues using data science and AI.”
