Non-executive Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Natural History Museum

Policy Leaders Fellow Alumnus, Centre for Science and Policy

Sir Patrick Vallance FRS FMedSci FRCP HonFREng joined the Board of Trustees at the Natural History Museum in October 2022 and took over as Chair early in 2023. He is the former Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA), having held this position from April 2018 to April 2023. He was also National Technology Adviser (NTA) and Head of the Government Science and Engineering (GSE) Profession.

Patrick was President, R&D at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) from 2012. Prior to this, he was Senior Vice President, Medicines Discovery and Development. He joined the company in May 2006 as Head of Drug Discovery. He is a member of the GSK Board and the Corporate Executive Team. Prior to joining GSK, he was a clinical academic, Professor of Medicine and led the Division of Medicine at UCL.

He has over 20 years’ experience of basic and clinical research, and was a consultant physician in the NHS. His research spanned from work on medicinal chemistry and structural biology, through to cellular work, studies in humans and use of large electronic health record data bases.

He was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1999 and to the Royal Society in 2017. He was on the Board of the UK Office for Strategic Co-ordination of Health Research from 2009 to 2016. He is an Honorary Fellow at both UCL and Imperial College London, a non-executive director and board member for UK Biobank, a non-executive board member for Genome Research Limited and a member of the Dementia Discovery Fund, which is managed by SV Life Sciences.