Sir Mark is Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation, which brings together the seven Research Councils, Innovate UK and Research England. UKRI became an official public body on 1 April 2018 and operates across the whole of the UK with a combined budget of more than £6 billion.

As former Director of the Wellcome Trust, Sir Mark has experience running a large scale research organisation and global charitable foundation. A distinguished scientist in his own right, Sir Mark was also Professor of Medicine and Head of the Division of Medicine at Imperial College London. 

He received a knighthood in the 2009 New Year Honours List for services to medical research and was elected as Fellow of The Royal Society in 2011.

Professor Kate Pickett

Kate Pickett is Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Health Sciences at the University of York, and the University’s Champion for Research on Justice and Equality; she is a Fellow of the RSA and of the UK Faculty of Public Health.  Kate’s research focuses on the social determinants of health and health inequalities, with a particular interest in child development.  Kate is co-author, with Richard Wilkinson, of the bestselling books, The Spirit Level (2009) and The Inner Level (2018). Kate is also a co-founder and trustee of The Equality Trust and a global Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance.

Professor Richard Wilkinson

Richard studied economic history and the philosophy of science at the London School of Economics before training in epidemiology.  From the 1970s onwards, his research focused on of social class differences in death rates.  He has played a formative role in international research on the social determinants of health and on the societal effects of income inequality.  His books and papers have drawn attention to the tendency for societies with bigger income differences between rich and poor to have a higher prevalence of a wide range of health and social problems.  Two of his books have been the subject of documentary films – one called The Great Leveller for the TV Channel 4 Equinox series broadcast in prime time in 1996 (to coincide with the publication of his Unhealthy Societies) and another, called The Divide (based on The Spirit Level) released in April 2016 and now available on Netflix.

Richard is now Professor Emeritus of Social Epidemiology at the University of Nottingham Medical School, Honorary Professor at University College London and Visiting Professor at the University of York.  He wrote The Spirit Level with Kate Pickett, a best seller now available in 24 languages.  It won the 2011 Political Studies Association Publication of the Year Award and the 2010 Bristol Festival of Ideas Prize. He co-founded The Equality Trust (with support from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust).  In 2013 Richard received Solidar’s Silver Rose Award and received Community Access Unlimited’s ‘Humanitarian of the Year’ Award.  The Irish Cancer Society awarded him the 2014 Charles Cully Memorial medal, and he was the 2017 medalist of The Australian Society for Medical Research.

In the last few years he has given many hundreds of conference addresses and media interviews round the world, including at WHO, the EU, OECD and the World Bank.

Dr. Suzanne Zeedyk is a research scientist fascinated by babies’ inborn capacity to communicate.   Since 1993, she has been based at the University of Dundee, within the School of Psychology.  In 2011, she set up her own independent training enterprise to disseminate more widely the science of the early years.  She now spends much of her time speaking to the public about our human need for emotional and physiological connection.  She is able to bring to this her research expertise on topics including parent-infant relationships, family support, communicative disorders, and the socio-political contexts that frame our responses to scientific information.  She works closely with organisations throughout the world to increase awareness of the decisions we take about caring for children, illuminating the way in which those decisions are integrally connected to our vision for the kind of society we wish to build. 

Professor Dr Christina Richards MSc, DCPsych, CPsychol, EuroPsy, FBPsS is an HCPC Registered Doctor of Applied Psychology and a full Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS) where she is the current Chair of the Division of Counselling Psychology; Committee member for Psychologist Prescribing; Lead National Assessor for Counselling Psychology; and Chair of the revision committee of the BPS Guidelines for working therapeutically with sexual, gender, and relationship diverse clients of which she was a co-author.

Professor Richards is Visiting Professor of Gender and Mental Health at Regent’s University London School of Psychotherapy and Psychology.

Prof. Richards is Lead Consultant Psychologist/Head of Psychology at the London Gender Identity Clinic (Charing Cross) within the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Prof. Richards is the Editor-in-Chief of the Counselling Psychology Review. Her own publications consist of numerous papers, reports, and book chapters predominantly focusing on sexuality, gender and relationships.