Meet the Trustees

Professor Sir Mark Walport is the Chairman of the Kennedy Memorial Trust and the recently retired founding Chief Executive of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), which is responsible for the public funding of research and innovation.

He was Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA) and Head of the Government Office for Science from April 2013 to September 2017. Before this, he was Director of the Wellcome Trust, Professor of Medicine and Head of the Division of Medicine at Imperial College London, and Founder Fellow and first Registrar of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

He was also a member of the Advisory Board of Infrastructure UK, a member of the India-UK CEO Forum and UK-India Round Table, and a non-executive member of the Office for Strategic Coordination of Health Research.

Mark received a knighthood in the 2009 New Year Honours List for services to medical research and was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 2011 and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2017.