Lord Smith has been the Master of Pembroke since 2015 and stepped down at the end of July 2025. He is a former Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and later Chairman of the Environment Agency.

Born in 1951, Lord Smith was educated in Edinburgh and then Pembroke College, Cambridge, achieving a double first in English (and later a PhD on Wordsworth and Coleridge) and was also a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard.

He began his political career as a Labour Councillor for the London Borough of Islington, becoming MP for Islington South and Finsbury in 1983. In 1992 he joined the Shadow Cabinet and held a number of frontbench posts before Labour came to power in 1997. He served as Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport until 2001 when he returned to the back benches, standing down from the Commons in 2005. Immediately afterwards he was made a life peer.

He chaired the Environment Agency from 2008 to 2014; from 2007 to 2017 he was also Chairman of the Advertising Standards Authority.

Professor Deborah Prentice became the University of Cambridge’s 347th Vice-Chancellor on July 1, 2023.

An eminent psychologist, Professor Prentice carried out her academic and administrative career at Princeton University, which she first joined in 1988. She rose through the academic ranks and took on administrative responsibilities of increasing scope, chairing the Department of Psychology for 12 years, serving as Dean of Faculty for three years, and then serving six years as Provost, with primary responsibility for all academic, budgetary, and long-term planning issues.

Her academic expertise is in the study of social norms that govern human behaviour – particularly the impact and development of unwritten rules and conventions, and how people respond to breaches of those rules. She has edited three academic volumes and published more than 50 articles and chapters, and she has specialised in the study of domestic violence, alcohol abuse and gender stereotypes.

Professor Jean Abraham is Professor of Precision Breast Cancer Medicine and Honorary Consultant in Medical Oncology at the University of Cambridge. She co-leads the Integrated Cancer Medicine (ICM) theme in the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, with oversight of the Cancer Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory, ICM Clinical Trials and Tissue Bank Rapid Response Team.  

Jean is also deputy theme lead for Cancer at the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Campus. She is part of the national NIHR Clinical Studies Group for Breast Cancer and part of the NCRI Working Party for Early Disease. She is Chief Investigator of PARTNER a neoadjuvant BRCA positive and triple negative early breast cancer trial investigating the benefit of adding novel targeted agents to standard chemotherapy. In addition, she is Co-Chief Investigator of the Personalised Breast Cancer Program, a real-world whole genome sequencing (DNA) and RNA sequencing project for women with all-stages of breast cancer.  

She graduated from the University of Liverpool Medical School and trained in Internal Medicine and Oncology at the University of Cambridge. She was awarded a National CRUK PhD Fellowship, receiving her PhD in Breast Cancer Pharmacogenetics from the University of Cambridge (2011). In 2017 she was awarded the “BioBeat Award for Top 50 Females in UK BioBusiness and Healthcare” and a Royal Society Award to enable closer links between academics/scientists and policy makers.  

Professor Grant Stewart was trained as an academic surgeon at the University of Edinburgh becoming Senior Lecturer and Group Leader of the Edinburgh Urological Cancer Group in 2013. In 2015, he moved to Cambridge where, in 2020, he became Professor of Surgical Oncology and has a focus on developing and promoting surgery related clinical trials and translational research. As a urological surgeon, Grant has a specific interest in optimising management of patients with initially localised renal cancer, by the development of early detection and optimal peri-surgical management.

In 2016 Grant developed the robotic kidney surgery programme in Cambridge and led the development of the multi-speciality robotic surgery programme which commenced in 2023. Grant is Director of the CRUK Cambridge Centre Urological Malignancies Virtual Institute and Integrated Cancer Medicine Program. He is passionate about clinical and academic training and Director of the Academic Clinical Fellow Programme in Cambridge, one of the UK’s largest ACF programme. He is Deputy Editor of The Surgeon and Section Editor of British Journal of Urology International. Grant is also a trustee of Kidney Cancer UK, Clinical Director of the National Kidney Cancer Audit, Clinical lead for the NICE Kidney Cancer Guideline and Chair of the Getting It Right First Time Kidney Cancer Pathway.