Professor Mark Mayer (HF 1980-82) 1980s, All Harkness Stories, Health & Social Care, Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths
chose a Fellowship which allowed him to train in laboratories in the US that were using techniques in ion channel biophysics not widely available in the UK. Most importantly, the Fellowship gave him the freedom to choose the laboratories that hosted him and to move between labs as his experience grew. As a result, he acquired new skills, leading to a series of studies that he pursued for the rest of his career and to his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Mark’s career focused on analysis of excitatory neurotransmitter receptors in the brain, initially using electrophysiological techniques, with which he discovered that NMDA receptors were calcium permeable ion channels, flux through which varied with membrane potential due to block by extracellular Magnesium. This mechanism forms a coincidence detector that acts as a gate triggering synaptic plasticity. Later he used X-ray diffraction and cryo-electron microscopy to study the structure of glutamate receptors, establishing mechanisms for subtype selective binding of ligands, allosteric modulation, and how desensitization occurs. This work furthers our understanding of a wide range of neurological disorders. Finding limited biomedical research funding opportunities in the UK on his return to London in 1982 led to Mark joining the brain drain and moving to the NIH. Subsequent emergence of the Wellcome Trust changed this, but by then he felt it was too disruptive to return home. Today, the UK is a vibrant place for biomedical research, and Mark often visits for academic collaborations.
Last updated: 29th October 2019
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Dr Nigel Croft (HF 1981-82) 1980s, All Harkness Stories, Economics, Finance & Business, Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths
is a world authority on quality management. After receiving his PhD in metallurgy from Sheffield University, Nigel spent his Harkness Fellowship conducting post-doctoral research at UC Berkeley, marking the beginning of his transformation from a “South Yorkshire lad” to a “Citizen of the world”. After completing his fellowship, he married Naila Diniz (also a PhD metallurgist) and emigrated to Brazil, becoming a Brazilian citizen in 1999. Over the years, Nigel has been actively involved in a range of global quality and sustainability initiatives, and from 2010 to 2018 he chaired the ISO technical subcommittee responsible for the ISO 9001 quality management standard. He has served as non-executive board member of a number of organizations around the world, including the Chartered Quality Institute (London), Social Accountability Accreditation Services (New York), and Fairtrade International’s certification body (FLOCERT) in Bonn. He is a consultant for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and Adjunct Professor of Quality Management at the University of Northern Malaysia. Nigel’s links with the US and the UK continue to be strong – in 2017 he was awarded the American Society for Quality’s Freund-Marquardt medal, “For his passion, dedication and leadership in the application of quality management” and in 2018 an Honorary (“Lifetime Achievement”) Award from the Chartered Quality Institute
Last updated: 18th April 2019
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Katrina Porteous (HF 1982-84) 1980s, All Harkness Stories, Creative Arts, Design & Architecture, Humanities
, poet, grew up near Consett, Co Durham, and read History at Trinity Hall Cambridge. She was awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1982 to study creative writing, and spent her first year at UC Berkeley, where her tutors included Thom Gunn and Robert Pinsky, and her second at Harvard, where her tutor was Seamus Heaney. In the months between she travelled widely, spending formative time in Native American Pueblo and Hopi communities in the South West, and in rural areas of the Southern states. This experience politicised her work, sharpening her sense of the interconnections between people, landscape, history and the natural world. Attempting an academic career after that was a mistake. In 1987 she moved to her grandparents’ house on the Northumberland coast, where she embedded herself in the dwindling traditional fishing community. An awareness of the universal importance of small-scale, sustainable local culture and ecology, which has informed her work ever since, resulted directly from her American travels. Katrina has published several poetry collections with Bloodaxe Books, including The Lost Music, Two Countries and Edge (poems for a planetarium). She received a Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1989, an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 1993 and an Arts Foundation Award in 2002. She is President of the Northumbrian Language Society and an ambassador for New Networks for Nature. In 1999 she accompanied two Northumbrian shepherd poets to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Nevada, and in 2014 performed her own work at the Fisher Poets’ Gathering in Oregon.
Last updated: 2nd April 2021
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Professor Nigel Richards (HF 1983-85) 1980s, All Harkness Stories, Health & Social Care, Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths
thought he was heading for pharmaceutical industry (B.Sc., Imperial College, Ph.D., Cambridge University) when he applied for a Harkness Fellowship. After upsetting at least one member of the selection committee, he was surprised to learn that he had been funded to work at Columbia University, New York. He was fortunate to code a software package for computing the structure and properties of organic and biological molecules, subsequently used in numerous laboratories throughout the world. As a result, he took up a lectureship at Southampton where he was among the first group of researchers to combine experiment and theory to address problems at the interface of chemistry and biology. Back in the USA in 1991, he carried out academic research in enzymology at the University of Florida, eventually becoming a Full Professor of Chemistry and a Distinguished Teaching Scholar. After a brief stint as Head of Chemistry & Chemical Biology at IUPUI in Indianapolis (2012-2015), family reasons caused him to return to the UK where he is presently Professor of Biological Chemistry at Cardiff University. He has been recognised for his work on the biosynthesis of the amino acid asparagine, which seems to lie at the heart of many forms of leukemia and tumour metastasis. He is actively involved in developing small molecules with potential use in treating sarcoma. His current research is aimed at re-engineering enzymes that will be useful in obtaining bacteria with expanded, “alien”, genetic alphabets and in the synthesis of novel anti-viral drugs.
Last updated: 13th July 2022
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John Sturrock (HF 1984 – 85) 1980s, All Harkness Stories, Law & Criminal Justice, Politics & Public Services
QC stepped out of the legal world in 1984 as a Harkness Fellow to study for a Masters’ Degree in International Law at the University of Pennsylvania. On returning to Scotland, he resumed a career in law at the Scottish Bar but his life had been changed. In the 1990’s, inspired by connections in the US and his knowledge of its legal system, he adapted the leading advocacy skills programme of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy into a Scottish context, establishing an award winning programme for his professional colleagues. Later, he studied negotiation at Harvard under Professor Roger Fisher (of Getting to Yes fame) and, leaving law, embarked on a second career as a mediator and negotiation consultant. He has helped to transform dispute resolution in his home country and elsewhere, and is now a world-recognised figure in the conflict resolution and policy-making field, working with politicians, governments, corporate leaders, Olympic athletes and many others – and mediating in complex disputes in many different contexts, often in the public context. In May 2018, in Edinburgh, John hosted and chaired the annual conference of the International Academy of Mediators, which he regards as a culmination of a journey which started as a Harkness Fellow thirty four years earlier and which gave him the confidence to look outward and across the Atlantic for ideas, learning and friendships.
Last updated: 25th May 2018
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The Rt. Hon. Sir Rabinder Singh (HF1985-86) 1980s, All Harkness Stories, Law & Criminal Justice
is now a Lord Justice of Appeal. Having studied Law at Trinity College, Cambridge, he did a Master of Laws degree at the University of California at Berkeley. He reports that he Ioved the Bay Area and had a wonderful time travelling with a friend all over the USA, from coast to coast and back again. He particularly enjoyed the great national parks of America advising that there is no better way to see them than by camping. On his return to the UK he was a lecturer in Law at the University of Nottingham for two years before qualifying as a barrister in 1989. Rabinder then practised in London until 2011, having become a QC in 2002. He specialised in public law, human rights and employment law, all areas, he comments, in which his studies in the US had been very influential on his thinking. He was appointed to the High Court in 2011 and to the Court of Appeal in 2017.
Last updated: 14th September 2018
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Alan Rosling (HF 1986-88) 1980s, All Harkness Stories, Economics, Finance & Business, International Affairs
CBE is an entrepreneur and strategic advisor focused on fast emerging economies, especially India. He co-founded Kiran Energy in Bombay and runs his own consultancy business, Griffin Growth Partners, based in Hong Kong. Alan was a Harkness Fellow in 1986 during which he did an MBA from Harvard Business School. He had previously been a banker with SG Warburg and after the Fellowship returned to the UK to work in a leadership position with Courtaulds Textiles. His subsequent career included the Policy Unit at 10 Downing Street (1991-93), Strategy Director of United Distillers (1993-1997), Chairman, India of the Jardine Matheson Group (1998-2003) and Executive Director of Tata Sons (2004-2009). Alan acts as a Non Executive Director on the Boards of Coats Group Plc, Constellation Alpha Capital Corporation and Vyome Biosciences. He is an advisor to a number of small, growth companies including Peotic, RedGirraffe.com and Insolight.
Last updated: 25th May 2018
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Professor Mary Ethna Black FRCP FPH (HF 1989-90) 1980s, All Harkness Stories, Health & Social Care
is a Northern Irish physician. After attending Rathmore Grammar School, Trinity College Dublin medical school and junior doctor training in Ireland and England, she applied for a Fellowship, intrigued by multi-disciplinary study. Her Master’s Degree at the Harvard School of Public Health concluded with her delivery of the Graduate English Oration at Commencement, and study visits to Alaska, Seattle, US Virgin Islands, and Vermont on public health and environmental protection. In 1991, drawn into the conflict in what was then Yugoslavia, she became WHO Deputy to Sir Donald Acheson, established the medical airlift from the besieged Sarajevo as a Senior Medical Officer with UNHCR, and when pregnant and no longer able to fit a flak jacket—served the humanitarian effort remotely with WHO from Copenhagen. After the war, she established a medical school in Far North Queensland as a Foundation Professor, but returned to Sarajevo and then Belgrade for post-conflict rebuilding. Mary has helped found two successful technology companies, served as a Director of Public Health in London, and was the most senior Public Health Doctor in Scotland during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Her current portfolio career includes Non-Executive Director of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the National Centre for Earth Observation, Trustee of Paintings in Hospitals, Honorary Professor at St Andrews University, Visiting Scholar at the Oxford University Centre for Life writing, and Fellow of Chapter Zero. She publishes essays, fiction and memoir and works on mitigating climate change.
Last updated: 19th January 2023
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