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.

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. 

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.

Sophie is the founder of Sophie Brendel Consulting, a global consultancy for arts, culture, media and heritage. Sophie specialises in strategy, brand, audience and impact, working with organisations including the National Trust, Somerset House, Royal Shakespeare Company and RADA. Over the past 25 years, Sophie has held senior leadership roles at the Reuters, the BBC, and most recently the V&A, where she was the Director of Audiences, Commercial & Digital until 2024. Sophie is also the Managing Director of Thornfalcon Winery & Press, and a Trustee and Board Advisor for organisations including Bristol Old Vic and Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration. Sophie is a member of the Audit and Risk Committee.  

Rose Dixon

Rose is Director of Strategy at Ark, a multi-academy trust and education charity. She started her career in academia with a PhD at Queen Mary, University of London and subsequently worked as a lecturer in the English department at King’s College London, before changing direction to become a strategy consultant at Bain & Company. She has spent the last decade working in a range of strategy roles in the charity sector, including six years as Head of Strategy at Cancer Research UK. Rose is a member of the Audit and Risk Committee.

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.

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.

Ang is a programme, project and property professional specialising in delivering estates master planning, infrastructure and facilities projects to support organisational change and transformation. She has over 25 years’ experience in property and facilities management across the public, private and voluntary/not-for-profit sectors in the UK and internationally. Ang is currently Director of the Science Transformation Programme at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where she is leading a research infrastructure programme to enable Kew Science to achieve the ambitions of its Science Strategy. With extensive experience working in Higher Education, Ang is a Goldsmiths graduate having studied BA English. Ang is a member of the Finance and Resources Committee.

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.

Liyun is Chief Financial Officer at the Design Museum, having joined this organisation in 2024. Prior to this she was Finance Director at Met Media group, a private equity-backed business that includes one of Europe’s leading film schools. Liyun started her career as a research scientist and has been a qualified Chartered Accountant for over a decade, with experience in audit and transaction services across Europe and the US. She is passionate about helping artistic organisations balance finance sustainability while focusing on their artistic and creative strategies. Liyun is also a non-executive director on the board of dance company Rambert. Liyun is a member of the Finance and Resources Committee.

Oliver is a conductor and cultural entrepreneur from London who has led concerts and recordings with the likes of the London Symphony Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, Philharmonia Orchestra and Academy of St Martin in the Fields. His projects include Classical Pride – a major celebration of LGBTQ+ composers and performers in classical music presented at venues from the Barbican to the Hollywood Bowl; a partnership with the podcast The Rest is History, presenting a series of sold-out concerts at the Royal Albert Hall exploring the lives of history's greatest composers; and Music x Museums, a concert series staged in leading museums including the V&A and British Library, filmed for Apple Music. Oliver is also a trustee of the Rio Cinema in East London. Oliver is a member of the Finance and Resources Committee.

Professor David Oswell is Interim Vice-Chancellor while a permanent leader of Goldsmiths is recruited.

In his substantive role of Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange, David is responsible for leading the development and overseeing the implementation of Goldsmiths’ Research and Knowledge Exchange Strategy.

As Provost he is the senior academic of Goldsmiths with membership of the Executive Board, with responsibility for Strategic Planning and Projects.

David joined Goldsmiths in 2001 and from 2013 to 2016 was Head of Department for Sociology. His current research interests concern the social life and history of children, childhood and children’s rights. David leads the academic pillar Research addressing the great challenges in our institutional strategy, A better world through knowledge and action.

Flora Cipullo

Professor Annabel Kiernan is responsible for strategic oversight of the College’s academic portfolio, education and the student experience, and academic staff progression and development.

A political scientist by discipline, Annabel’s academic career spans three decades, with leadership roles focused on transforming teaching and learning, advancing inclusion, and supporting student success across the sector.

Annabel leads the academic pillar A distinctive learning environment in our institutional strategy, A better world through knowledge and action.

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.