Advisory Board

Helen Mountfield KC

Helen Mountfield KC is Principal of Mansfield College Oxford, and a founder member of Matrix Chambers. She has almost 30 years’ experience in equality and human rights law, as they relate to employment, education, goods and services and charities. She has been involved in some of the leading equality cases including the first case on the Public Sector Equality Duty and important cases about equality and education, including Tigere in the Supreme Court about student fees and discrimination on grounds of immigration status; Watkins-Singh about religious dress in schools; the Al-Hijrah school case about gender segregation in schools; and the Jewish Free School case in the Supreme Court about the definition of a racial group and categorising different forms of discrimination.

For many years Helen was a member of the EHRC panel of counsel and is co-author of the first seven editions of the Blackstone Guide to the Human Rights Act 1998.

Dr Shabna Begum

Shabna (PhD) leads our research team and function. She oversees the research delivery of every major project and ongoing programme across the Runnymede Trust’s esteemed research portfolio. Shabna's expertise includes racial inequalities in education and in access to housing as well as the intersection between gender and generation with race.

Dr Anne-Marie Coriat

Anne-Marie Coriat was appointed Registrar for the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine in January 2022. As Registrar Anne-Marie has overall responsibility for strategic operations across College and works in partnership across the university to optimise ways of working.
Immediately prior to joining Edinburgh Anne-Marie was Head of UK/EU Research Landscape at the Wellcome Trust and before that held a joint appointment as Chair of the RCUK Research Group and Director of Capacity, Skills and Infrastructure at the Medical Research Council. She has over 20 years experience working across research funders in strategic planning, policy, operational delivery and funding. She was co-Chair and a founding partner of the Research on Research Institute a global cross sector partnership working to improve how research is funded, practiced and evaluated.

Professor Chris Millward

Chris Millward is Professor of Practice in Education Policy at the University of Birmingham where he leads a group of researchers working on educational equity in policy and practice.  He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, a Marshall Scholarship Commissioner, a Trustee of the Society for Research into Higher Education and Chair of the Advisory Group for the Centre for Global Higher Education at the University of Oxford.  Chris also serves on advisory groups for the British Council and the governments in Wales and Scotland.  Prior to joining the University of Birmingham, he was Director for Fair Access and Participation on the board and executive of England’s higher education regulator the Office for Students, Director of Policy at the Higher Education Funding Council for England and Head of Research Programmes at the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.  

Alisha Odoi-Smith

Alisha is a second year history DPhil student at Oxford, generously funded by the Black Academic Futures scholarship, whose research is focused on writing Black radical histories. She previously completed her MPhil in African studies at Cambridge university. She also runs a TORCH funded reading group focused on making academic theory more accessible. Issues of accessibility & widening participation in academia are at the forefront of her work and volunteer activities.

Oisharja Rahman

Profile to follow

Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE

Hayaatun is CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation. She co-chairs with the Science Minister the government’s Business Innovation Forum and co-chaired with Sir Lewis Hamilton his Commission on improving Black representation in motorsport. She is a trustee of various charities, member of the government’s Levelling Up Advisory Council and Digital Skills Council and NXD at construction company Laing O’Rourke. She has been named as one of the ‘Inspiring 50’ women in tech in Europe and one of the most influential women in both UK engineering and UK tech.
She has a Masters in Biochemistry (MBiochem) from Oxford and a PhD from Cancer Research UK/UCL. She is a Fellow of the IET, Honorary Professor at UCL and Honorary Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford. She has received honorary doctorates from UCL, Imperial College London, Newcastle, Brunel, Huddersfield and Southampton, as well as a Science Suffrage Award and the Engineering Professor’s Council President’s Medal. She was a finalist for the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award and was made a CBE for services to International Engineering in 2019.
Prior to her current roles, she was Deputy CEO at the Academy and served as Committee Specialist and later Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee.

Paulette Williams

Paulette has over 15 years experiences leading widening participation and student success projects in higher education.
She is active in addressing racial inequities in higher education contributing to advisory groups led by organisations such as Universities UK (UUK) and London Higher as well as Co-Chairing the Race Equality Steering Group at UCL where she works as Co-Lead for the BAME Awarding Gap project.
Paulette has delivered training, given keynotes and contributed to panels on topics linked to race equity in higher education and the BAME Awarding Gap; and remains passionate about creating a network in higher education for the Black community that support students throughout the academic lifecycle.

Wendy Williams CBE

Wendy Williams, a solicitor, was a partner in a defence firm before joining Her Majesty’s Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate (HMCPSI). In 2003 she joined the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) as the Legal Director of the CPS London North Sector and was subsequently appointed as the Chief Crown Prosecutor (CCP) for CPS Northumbria and the North East region in 2009. 
In 2015 Wendy was appointed as His Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary at HMIC (now HMICFRS) and has responsibility for 13 forces covering the West Midlands, Wales and South West areas. In July 2017 her role was extended to include the inspection of fire and rescue services across 11 areas in the Western region. Wendy is committed to increasing diversity and inclusion in policing and the fire and rescue service. 
Wendy is also the author of the independent Windrush Lessons Learned Review into the Home Office and its handling of events leading up to the Windrush scandal. This was presented to Parliament in 2020. The Home Secretary invited Wendy to consider the progress made by the department in implementing her 30 recommendations, and her Windrush Lessons Learned Review Progress Update was published in March 2022. In 2020, she was appointed as a Non-executive Director of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.  
Wendy was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s New Year Honours list of 2021.