Professor Sir Edwin M. Southern, FRSE is the Founder & Trustee of the Kirkhouse Trust. He founded the charity in 2000 using royalties from licencing microarray technology, from Oxford Gene Technology Ltd, a company he founded in 1995.

 

Sir Ed Southern is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford and an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He is best known for his invention of the Southern blot (now a common laboratory procedure). Photo credit: Paul Karaimu.

Professor Appolinaire Djikeng is the Chair of Trustees at the Kirkhouse Trust. Professor Djikeng is the 4th Director General of the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and Senior Director for the Livestock-based systems of the CGIAR. Prior to ILRI and the CGIAR, Professor Djikeng was Director of the Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health (CTLGH) and based at the Roslin Institute, and Professor and Chair for Tropical Agriculture and Sustainable Development at the University of Edinburgh.

 

Professor Djikeng has over 20 years’ research and institutional experience in academia and in international not for profit research institutions in the USA, Africa, and UK/Europe. Appolinaire serves on numerous science advisory boards and has received many awards including the Nelson Mandela Justice Award.

 

Professor Djikeng’s work, and interests have been primarily centred around bioscience (and particularly genomics and related disciplines) and their applications in agriculture (both animals and crops), human and environmental health.

 

Djikeng is Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland, Center for Animal Science (Australia), Professor at The Roslin Institute, The University of Edinburgh (UK), and Distinguished Professor at the University of South Africa.

Professor Sir Adrian P. Bird, FRS is Buchanan Professor of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh and former director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology. He is a Trustee of the Rett Syndrome Research Trust and is an authority on the role of epigenetics in brain disease. 

 

Sir Adrian's awards include the Brain Prize (2020) and the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine (2016). He received a knighthood in 2014 and was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2016.

Sir Paul M. Nurse, FRS is a British geneticist and cell biologist who is Director and Chief Executive of the Francis Crick Institute and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Sir Paul won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, along with Leland H. Hartwell and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells in the cell cycle.

 

Knighted in 1999, Sir Paul has won several other prestigious awards such as the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the French Legion d'Honneur, the Copley Medal and was elected as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006.

Daniel Hulls is an investment, public policy and development professional with over 25 years of experience in both the private and public sectors.

 

Daniel is the CEO of AgDevCo and was the founding director of CEPA (a UK-based finance and economics consultancy) where he was Managing Director until 2009. Prior to that, he worked for N M Rothschild in project finance and asset sales; and at the UK Treasury. He was a non-executive Director and Chair of the finance and audit committee at Community Housing Group.