Rt Hon Lord Alec Broers 

Professor Lord (Alec) Broers FREng FRS Kt DL was Master of Churchill College from 1990-1996 and was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge from 1996-2003. He was knighted in 1998 and made a Life Peer in 2004. He was educated at Melbourne University and the University of Cambridge and worked in the Research & Development laboratories of IBM in the USA for nineteen years, becoming an IBM Fellow and ultimately holding responsibility for the development of chip technologies. His personal research concerned electron microscopes and the fabrication of nanoelectronic devices but his interests cover most aspects of the development of technology.

Lord Broers returned to the UK in 1984 as Head of Electrical Engineering at Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College. He subsequently became Head of the Department of Engineering and Master of Churchill College before becoming Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He was Chairman of the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee (2004-2007), and was President of the Royal Academy of Engineering from 2001 to 2006. He Chaired the board of directors of the Diamond Light Source, which is the UK’s largest new science facility to be commissioned in the last 30 years, from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the boards of several high technology start-up companies and is presently on the Board of FlexEnable, a company that is pioneering the applications of flexible plastic electronics. He also chairs the International Visitng Committee of the Department of Engineering and the Cambridge Graphene Centre Advisory Board. He held a Sir Louis Matheson visiting professorhip at Monash University in Melbourne from 2008 until 2015 and maintains his interest in music as President of the Australian Music Foundation.