Government Chief Scientific Adviser, Government Office for Science, and Head of Government Science and Engineering Profession

Policy Leaders Fellow, Centre for Science and Policy

Professor Dame Angela McLean DBE FRS is the Government Chief Scientific Adviser having taken up the role in April 2023. She is also Head of the Government Science and Engineering Profession. Prior to this Angela was the Chief Scientific Adviser for the Ministry of Defence.

Until April 2023, Angela McLean was a Professor of Mathematical Biology in the Department of Zoology at Oxford University and a Fellow of All Souls College. She was also the Director of the Institute of Emerging Infections, a multi-disciplinary team of biologists, mathematicians and clinicians working to understand the underlying processes that drive the emergence and spread of novel human infectious diseases.

Professor McLean's research interests lie in the use of mathematical models to aid our understanding of the evolution and spread of infectious agents. This encompasses modelling of the dynamics of infections and immune responses within individual hosts as well as models of the spread of infections from one host to another. Her groups current research interests focus on: HIV, HCV and Influenza.

She studied mathematics at Oxford followed by a PhD in biomathematics at Imperial College, London. After a brief spell in the City she joined the Mathematical Biology Group at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, then returning to Oxford as a Royal Society University Research Fellow in 1990. In 1998 she became Head of Mathematical Biology at the BBSRC’s Institute for Animal Health. Returning to Oxford in 2000, she was made Professor of Mathematical Biology in 2004. She was elected to the Royal Society in 2009, and was awarded the Royal Society's Gabor Medal in 2011.