Lord Browne

Lord Browne of Madingley is the Chairman of the Board of the Francis Crick Institute.
 
He is the Founder and Chairman of BeyondNetZero, a climate growth equity venture established in partnership with General Atlantic. He served as Group Chief Executive of the international energy company BP from 1995 to 2007, having joined the company in 1966 as a university apprentice. He led BP through a period of significant growth and transformation, including eleven mergers with companies starting with Amoco in 1998 and including Arco, Veba and Castrol. His landmark speech at Stanford University in 1997 established BP as a global leader in the way it thought about and sought to address climate change.
 
In 2007, he joined Riverstone, a private equity entity, where he was co-head of the world’s largest renewable energy fund until 2015. He is presently Chairman of Pattern Energy, a renewable energy company, Windward, a global maritime predictive intelligence company, and Chairman of SparkCognition, an artificial intelligence technology company.
 
He is the independent co-Chairman of the UK Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology, Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, Chairman of the Courtauld Institute of Art, and previously served as Chairman of the Tate Galleries and President of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He also serves as a Trustee of the Royal Opera House. He was the UK Government’s lead non-executive board member from 2010 until 2015, and chaired the committee that published the Browne Report into higher education.
 
He holds an MA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and an MS in Business from Stanford University in California. In 1999 the Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him the Prince Philip Medal for his outstanding contribution to engineering. He was knighted in 1998 and made a life peer in 2001. He has an interest in Italian works on paper post 1450, art, music, opera and theatre, and is the author of five books.