People

Professor Dame Carol Black DBE FRCP FMedSci was appointed Chair of the British Library Board on 1 September 2018. 

Dame Carol chairs the Boards of the Centre for Ageing Better and Think Ahead, the Government’s fast-stream training programme for Mental Health Social Workers.   She is Expert Adviser on Health and Work to NHS England/Improvement and Public Health England and until August 2019 was Principal of Newnham College Cambridge. She is a member of Rand Europe’s Council of Advisers, the Board of the Institute for Employment Studies, the Board of UK Active, and the Advisory Board of Step up to Serve.

She has authored three independent reviews for the UK Government: of the health of the working-age population in 2008 as National Director for Health and Work; of sickness absence in Britain in 2011 as co-chair; and of employment outcomes of addiction to drugs or alcohol, or obesity, in 2016.    She is currently working on a fourth independent review for Government, of illicit drugs in England:  Part 1 on supply and demand, and the market for drugs, was published in February 2020, and Part 2 on prevention, treatment and recovery will be published in 2021.   

Dame Carol is a past-President of the Royal College of Physicians, of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, and of the British Lung Foundation, and past-Chair of the Nuffield Trust for health policy. The Centre she established at the Royal Free Hospital in London is internationally renowned for research and treatment of connective tissue diseases such as scleroderma. She has been a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.

As Principal of Newnham, Dame Carol was on several committees in Cambridge University, and she remains a  patron of the Women’s Leadership Centre in the Judge Business School, and a member of the University’s Advisory Board on Student Mental Health.