Dr Diana Walford CBE

Diana is Chair of the Inner Circle Educational Trust. Previously she was Chair of the Board of Trustees of Regent’s University London, Deputy Chairman of Council of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford University. She is a Liverpool alumna, qualifying in medicine in 1968, after an intercalated first-class BSc (Hons) in physiology in 1965. Diana trained as a haematologist with a research interest in the haemoglobinopathies, for which she was awarded an MD in 1976.

After eight years in the NHS, she joined the then Department of Health and Social Security as an assessor on the safety and efficacy of medicines. Following a series of promotions, and a year-out to gain an MSc in epidemiology at the LSHTM, she was appointed Deputy Chief Medical Officer for England and Medical Director and Director of Healthcare on the NHS Management Executive. She left the Department of Health in 1992 to become Director of the Public Health Laboratory Service, a non-departmental public body responsible for the surveillance and prevention of communicable diseases in England and Wales. She was appointed Principal of Mansfield College in 2002 and retired in 2011.

She has been a non-executive director on the Boards of the NHS Blood and Transplant Authority and University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, a trustee of Sue Ryder, and a member of the State Honours Committee. She is an Honorary Governor of the Ditchley Foundation; a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Royal College of Pathologists and Faculty of Public Health. In 2002 she was awarded a CBE for services to public health.