Dame Mary Archer

Dame Mary read chemistry at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and went on to do her PhD at Imperial College, London, followed by post-doctoral fellowships at Oxford and The Royal Institution, London, where she developed her longstanding research interest in physico-chemical aspects of solar energy conversion. She then taught chemistry for ten years for Newnham and Trinity College, Cambridge.

Leaving full-time teaching in 1986, she developed a diverse portfolio career which included membership of the Council of Lloyd’s of London and the board of Anglia Television and serving as the Visitor of the University of Hertfordshire.

She sat on the board of Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust from 1993, and was chair for ten years from 2002 – 2012. She served for nine years as Chair of the Science Museum Group from 2015 to 2023. She is currently President of Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust and Cambridge Global Health Partnerships, and co-chair of the Campaign Board to raise funds to build Cambridge Children’s Hospital.
Dame Mary is a Companion of the Energy Institute, Patron of the National Energy Foundation, an Honorary Liveryman of the Fuellers’ Company and Chair of the Salters’ Institute of Industrial Chemistry. She is Chancellor of the University of Buckingham and holds honorary DSc degrees from Imperial College London and the Universities of Hertfordshire and Bradford.

Dame Mary is the author of Rupert Brooke and The Old Vicarage, Grantchester (1989) and The Story of the Old Vicarage, Grantchester (2012), and co-editor of Clean Electricity from Photovoltaics (2001), Molecular to Global Photosynthesis (2004), The 1702 Chair of Chemistry at Cambridge (2005) and Nanostructured and Photoelectrochemical Systems for Solar Photon Conversion (2008).

In 2012, Dame Mary was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) for her services to the National Health Service.