Head of Policy, Resilience and Emerging Technologies, Royal Society

Continuing Policy Fellow, Centre for Science and Policy

Elizabeth Surkovic is the Head of Policy, Resilience and Emerging Technologies at The Royal Society. Her work currently focuses on low carbon futures, emerging technologies, and science in public life.

Before joining the Royal Society in 2016, Elizabeth Surkovic was the Deputy Director for Science at the Government Office for Science. Her responsibilities ranged across the entire Government policy portfolio from bee health to nuclear power. She and her team worked with Government Departments ensuring that science had been well used in any one area, resolving disagreements between Departments and leading on the investigation of issues of scientific merit and producing reports for use in policy development.

Prior to this she worked in the Cabinet Office and the Better Regulation Executive where she led a Bill on better regulation, and in Defra where she worked on chemical management. The most notable element of that was negotiation of the REACH Regulation.

Prior to becoming a civil servant she worked in the chemical industry for 15 years where she was Director of an SME. Her core function there was to work on chemical regulation. She is by training a biochemist and graduated from Birmingham.

To read about Elizabeth's experience as a Policy Fellow in Cambridge see here.