Two new non-party-political peers recommended by the independent House of
Lords Appointments Commission were announced
today.
The new peers are:
-
Dr Alexandra Freeman, a filmmaker, and expert
in the communication of science, evidence and risk
-
Professor Lionel Tarassenko CBE, a British
engineer and academic, who is an expert in the application of
signal processing and machine learning to healthcare
They will sit on the crossbenches.
Notes to Editors
-
Dr Alexandra Freeman was until recently the
Executive Director of Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence
Communication at the University of Cambridge, with a focus
on improving how professionals such as doctors, journalists or
legal professionals communicate numbers and uncertainty.
Alexandra's career has a dual focus on communication and
science: As a filmmaker she won a BAFTA (for Walking with
Beasts Interactive), a Prix Europa, an RTS award and the
AAAS Kavli Gold Award for science journalism (for Climate
Change by Numbers, which she produced & directed) and
was Series Producer of Trust Me, I'm a Doctor. As a
scientist, she led a team at the University of Cambridge and
has written research papers and widely read articles designed
to help communicate research evidence to a broader audience.
She helped communicate the evidence around Covid-19
transmission and the benefits and risks of vaccination during
the pandemic. She was a member of the Scientific Advisory Group
to the Grenfell Tower soil contamination investigation, and
part of an Expert Advisory Group helping with public health
reform in Ireland. Her combination of experience in academia
and communication led her to create a new platform for sharing
research findings, called Octopus.ac, funded by UK Research
& Innovation. Alexandra was born in Maryland, USA and now
lives near Abingdon in Oxfordshire.
-
Professor Lionel Tarassenko is the founding
President of Reuben College and Research Professor in the
Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford.
He held the Statutory Chair of Electrical Engineering for 22
years, during which time he was also the Director of the
Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the Head of the
Department of Engineering Science from 2014 to 2019. He is
internationally recognised for being amongst the first to apply
machine learning to real-world problems in the early 1990s,
winning a British Computer Society Medal in 1996. Most of his
research has been concerned with the application of AI to
safety-critical systems, working on jet engine health
monitoring (with Rolls-Royce) and on patient monitoring and
treatment in the NHS, to improve outcomes from intensive care
to community settings. He is passionate about technology
transfer from universities, having founded four spin-out
companies, and he has served on the Board of Oxford University
Innovation since 2012. He was the Scientific co-ordinator for
the Foresight Project on Cognitive Systems (Office of Science
and Technology), and the Editor-in-Chief of the Topol Review
(2017-19) for the NHS “Preparing the healthcare workforce to
deliver the digital future”. He is a Fellow of both the Royal
Academy of Engineering and the Academy of Medical Sciences and
was made a CBE for services to Engineering in 2012.
- The House of Lords
Appointments Commission is an independent
non-statutory advisory body set up by the Prime Minister to
make recommendations for non-party-political peerages.
The Commission's remit is to find people of distinction
who will bring authority and expertise to the House of Lords.
The Commission recommends individuals on merit and their
ability to contribute effectively to the work of the House.
- The Commission also vets nominations for life
peers, including those nominated by the UK political parties,
for propriety.
- The House of Lords Appointments
Commission has recommended a total of 76
non-party-political peerages (since 2000) to the Prime
Minister, drawn from approximately 5900 nominations. The
Commission last recommended non-party-political peers in May
2022.
