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.

The University Council nominated Professor Prentice for appointment as Vice-Chancellor in September 2022. Her appointment was subsequently approved by the Regent House.

Professor Caroline (Carrie) Vout is a historian and art-historian, whose research embraces Greek and Roman art and its reception in the modern period, classical literature, religion, topography, gender, and body history. Carrie has contributed to exhibitions at the Wellcome Collection, Tate Britain, and Leiden’s Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, and been sole curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum, where she was also part of the team that rehung the Greek and Roman Gallery, and at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. The catalogue for the HMI show, Antinous: the Face of the Antique (2006)  won the inaugural Art Book Award.

Carrie is a public-facing Classicist who is at home on television, radio and at literary festivals. She is a regular speaker at schools. Three short videos of Carrie talking about sculpture, one of them in the Paris exhibition, can be found here.

At the University of Cambridge, Carrie is a Professor of Classics at the Faculty of Classics, Director of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, and a Fellow in Classics and Director of Studies at Christ’s College. She is also the Byvanck Chair of Classical Archaeology/Art History at the University of Leiden.

Chris Young is a Professor of Modern and Medieval German Studies at the University of Cambridge. Prior to his appointment as Master of St Edmund's College, he served as Head of the School of Arts and Humanities. A trained Germanist, Professor Young is also the Director of the Cambridge DAAD Research Hub for German Studies and the founder and Director of the Cambridge-LMU Strategic Partnership, Cambridge’s first institution-wide partnership between Cambridge and any other university.

His primary teaching and research interests focus on medieval German literature and language, as well as the history of European sport, with a particular emphasis on German sport. He has been a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (Cologne), a Permanent Visiting Fellow of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule für literaturwissenschaftliche Studien der FU Berlin (2010-12), a Visiting Fellow of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte Munich (2018) and an Honorary Fellow of the Historisches Kolleg Munich (2018). His monograph ‘The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany’ (UC Press, 2010, with Kay Schiller) was the first book to win the prizes of both the British and North American Societies for sports history. In 2021, his ‘The Whole World was Watching. Sport in the Cold War’ (Stanford University Press, 2020) also won the latter’s anthology prize. He curated a major exhibition this summer at the Fitzwilliam Museum on the 1924 Paris Olympics (best known through the film ‘Chariots of Fire’) and serves on the German government’s Historical Commission on the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Rebecca has been a member of the Exhibitions team at The Fitzwilliam Museum since 2022 and since then has worked closely with curators on several major exhibitions including Hockney’s Eye: The Art and Technology of Depiction (15 March – 29 August 2022) and Real Families: Stories of Change (6 October 2023 – 7 January 2024).

Her current projects are Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body and The Making of Ancient Egypt (working title).

Ed Smith is a renowned thinker on sport, leadership and decision-making.

He is Co-Founder and Director of the Institute of Sports Humanities, which he set up in 2019.

Ed played cricket for Kent, Middlesex and England and was Chief Selector for England cricket from 2018 to 2021, a period of unprecedented success for England’s men’s teams.

After his playing career, Ed became a Leader Writer for The Times and a BBC broadcaster. He is a Contributing Writer for the New Statesman. He has published five books. Making Decisions is out now, published by the William Collins imprint at HarperCollins.