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Science Council Members Biographies

Published 25 June 2026

1. Professor John O’Brien (Chair)

Professor O’Brien is founder of the Food Observatory, UK and a visiting professor at Ulster University, Coleraine. In his previous career to 2018 he led the Nestlé global competence centre for Food Safety & Quality and the company’s Food Safety and Integrity Research Programme in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is also a former head of food safety for the Danone Group in Paris.

From 2004 to 2009 he was chief executive officer (CEO) of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland.  His experience at senior level spans risk assessment, regulatory affairs and food production, both as a scientific practitioner and as a user of advice to translate scientific evidence into public policy and to communicate around high-profile and complex issues.

He is chair of the Advisory Board of the Nutrition Innovation Centre for Diet and Health (NICHE) at Ulster University.  He sits on several professional committees concerned with food safety and health and is a non-executive board member of Campden BRI.

2. Professor Peter Borriello

Professor Borriello is a microbiology graduate and Fellow of University College London. His career history includes appointment as head of a Medical Research Council Unit, working on pathogenicity of bacterial infections; founding director of the Institute of Infections and Immunity, University of Nottingham; and was appointed in October 1995 director of the Public Health Laboratory Service Central Public Health Laboratory, which was the National Centre for Reference Microbiology.

From 2003 to 2008 he was an executive director of the Health Protection Agency (HPA) in his capacity as director of the Specialist and Reference Microbiology Division, and then director of the new HPA Centre for Infections, which added the National Communicable Diseases Surveillance Centre to the portfolio of responsibilities.  This included responsibility for national Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) surveillance.  He was also chief scientist for the HPA and authored their first five-year research strategy. His penultimate post was as chief executive of the Veterinary Laboratories Agency, and his last post was the chief executive of the Veterinary Medicines Directorate and senior civil servant.  He was on the European Heads of Medicines Agencies Management Board, and chaired their task-force on antimicrobial resistance. He was also chair of the AMR one health sub-group of the Global Health Security Agenda AMR Action Package. He had UK responsibility for AMR surveillance of animals and for animal antibiotic use, sat on the Government High Level Steering Group for the national AMR strategy, and remains a member of the Hong Kong Government Expert Committee on AMR.

His basic science research has led to over 300 publications. He has been chair of a number of international and national learned societies and committees, on the editorial board of six scientific journals, and was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Microbiology.  He was the first chair of the World Health Organisation Laboratory Twinning Programme, in support of improvements to help compliance with the new International Health Regulations, and was the first chair of Med-Vet-Net (a consortium of European animal and human health Institutes co-ordinating improved zoonoses research and responses).

3. Professor Emily Burton

Professor Emily Burton is Professor of Sustainable Food Production and co-lead for Nottingham Trent University (NTU) Sustainable Futures Research Theme. She has worked alongside the poultry industry on research programmes for 25 years and now leads the NTU’s Poultry Nutrition Research Unit.

4. Professor Steven Cummins

Steven Cummins is Professor of Population Health and National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) senior investigator in the Department of Public Health, Environments & Society at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) where he also co-leads LSHTM’s Population Health Innovation Lab. He is a geographer with training in epidemiology and public health and his research interests include the role of the food environment in determining diet-related health and health inequalities, the evaluation of food system policies and interventions and complex systems thinking. Much of this work is focused on food retail system transformation and its implications for sustainable and healthy diets, with a particular interest in the impact of technology-driven changes (delivery, advertising, retail, sustainability) and the evaluation of population-level interventions to change food purchasing behaviours.

He has a strong interest in the funding and delivery of innovative and impactful public health research and evidence-based policy. He has served as chair and member of many strategic funding committees in the UK and internationally, acted as a member of the Global Advisory Committee of The Movember Foundation and was previously a member of the Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) Social Science Research Committee (now Advisory Committee for Social Science). Outside of his academic role he has spent over a decade as governor and chair of Governors of a number  primary and secondary schools in South East London, some of it with a remit for improving school food.

5. Professor Peter Gregory

Professor Gregory is Emeritus Professor of Global Food Security at the University of Reading having previously been Professor of Soil Science at the same university. He is chair of the Recommended List Board for the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) and the board of Crops For the Future (CFF) UK CIC.

His role in CFF is to maintain oversight of research development as the organisation establishes its international programmes. He was chief executive of the Scottish Crop Research Institute from 2005 to 2011 and then of East Malling Research from 2011 to 2015. He chaired the Advisory Committee for Novel Foods and Processes (ACNFP) for the Food Standards Agency between 2010-2020. Professor Gregory is an honorary life president of the International Society of Root Research.

6. Jacqueline Healing

Jackie Healing is a food scientist with over 40 year’s experience directing and leading food safety programmes for food retailers globally. She recently led the consulting and advisory services for NSF, a leading Testing Inspection and certification body. Jackie currently works as an independent food safety consultant,  is a fellow of the Institute of Food Science and Technology (IFST)  and a board member of the Society of Food Hygiene and Technology  (SOFHT).

7. Claire Nicholson

Claire Nicholson is the Science Council member representing the consumer interest and has held a range of roles representing consumer interests including having been an independent director to represent consumer interests on the Board of Red Tractor.

Claire Nicholson’s representation of consumer interests has included being the consumer member of the Advisory Committee on Novel Foods and Processes, a member of the Food Standards Agency Consumer Advisory Panel and a member of the Advisory Committee on Consumer Engagement, and the Current and Future Meat Controls Stakeholder Group.  In her earlier career Claire was a departmental director at Sainsbury’s supermarkets in a number of consumer-facing roles.

8. Professor Tom Oliver

Professor Tom Oliver is the research dean for Environment at the University of Reading and a Professor of Applied Ecology. He has advised Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in the UK government, helping them to set up a ‘Systems Research Programme’, and the Cabinet Office on ‘chronic risks’ to complement the UK National Security Risk Assessment. He regularly advises the European Commission and was previously a member of the European Environment Agency scientific committee, working on sustainability transitions. Oliver’s research helps understand the mechanisms by which food systems become locked into undesirable states, and how they change over time across the world. His recent work shows how food system change requires a deeper focus on sociocultural factors beyond technological and economic interventions, and he is co-author on a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report on this topic. He has led UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) consortium projects developing methods to appraise systemic risks to food security and is a founding member of the international ASRA network developing approaches to assess complex risks. He has published more than 100 scientific papers in world-leading interdisciplinary journals and enjoys communicating science through popular writing and speaking at public events.

9. Professor Simon Pearson

Simon Pearson is Professor of Agri-Food Technology and founding director of the Lincoln Institute of Agri-Food Technology at the University of Lincoln. He specialises in interdisciplinary research that spans the agri-food system, including agri-food robotics, use of digital systems in food manufacturing, the application of AI across the food chain and data governance in complex systems. Prior to joining the University of Lincoln in 2016, he spent 15 years in industry as a technologist managing supply chains for Marks and Spencer plc and running a commercial farming company.

He helped establish and ran the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Internet of Food Things network that examined the use of digital technology across the food system and was co-chair of the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) Automation and Robotics Review for Horticulture.

10. Professor Richard Smith

Richard Smith is Professor of Public Health Economics and deputy pro vice-chancellor for the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at the University of Exeter.  He was previously the University’s deputy vice-chancellor for Strategy Integration and Resources, and prior to this he was dean of the Faculty of Public Health & Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Richard has experience with a wide range of economic methods, including micro-, macro-, behavioural-, and political-economic techniques, applied to various areas, from health outcome assessment to antibiotic resistance.  He has pioneered the macro-economic modelling of communicable and non-communicable diseases and the economic analysis of the impact of trade and trade agreements on health and health care across a range of areas.  Most recently he has focussed on the assessment of fiscal measures related to public health, including evaluation of the UK ‘sugar tax’ and several projects related to the economics of food systems.

Richard has been elected as an honorary member of the Faculty of Public Health, member of the Royal Society of Public Health, fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and as a principal fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

11. Professor Michael Tildesley

Michael Tildesley is a Professor in the Zeeman Institute for Systems Biology and Infectious Disease Epidemiology Research at the University of Warwick. His research focuses upon the development of models of infectious diseases and their utility as predictive tools. He has a particular interest in the predictive power of models in the early stages of disease outbreaks, when there is significant uncertainty regarding the spread of disease.

Professor Tildesley has strong links with policy makers, working closely with the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) upon strategies for disease control.

12. Professor Jonathan Wastling

Professor Wastling is deputy vice-chancellor at Brunel University, London. He is a Professor of Infection Biology specialising in human and animal infectious diseases with a long-standing interest in food security.

He has over 30 years of experience working on the biology of human and animal pathogens where his research has focussed on host-pathogen interactions, vaccine and drug development.  Professor Wastling has previously served on advisory bodies in the area of animal health, welfare and food security and is an editor of Parasitology journal.  He has a keen interest in the role of higher education in international development, previously serving for six years as a Government appointed commissioner at the UK Commonwealth Scholarship Commission and as chair of Awards Policy.