This is a pro bono role. Syndics are expected to attend four Syndicate meetings per year taking place in Cambridge or the Cambridgeshire area. Syndics are expected to join in person but online attendance can be organised if needed when the meeting format allows it.
Each Syndic may also be invited by the Chair to chair or join one of the five sub-committees including the Nominations Committee, the Research Committee, the Hamilton Kerr Institute Advisory Board, the Finances and General Purposes Committee and the Collections Development Group. Those sub-committee meetings take place on average four times per year in one of the Museum’s buildings or in the Cambridge area.
Appointments to the Syndicate are for a period of four to eight years, depending on availability and mutual agreement.
Appendix 1: About the Board
The Syndicate acts as the main board for the Fitzwilliam Museum and reports directly to the University’s General Board. It plays a central role in ensuring that the Museum remains accountable to the University while operating with the flexibility and ambition needed to succeed in the national and international cultural landscape.
Summary CVs and full biographies for our current Syndics can be found below:
| Syndic | Biography |
| Sir Richard Heaton,
Chair of Syndicate
|
Richard has been Warden of Robinson since October 2021. Richard joined the College after a Civil Service career focusing on justice and the constitution. He was Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice and Clerk of the Crown from 2015 to 2020; before that, he was Permanent Secretary at the Cabinet Office. Richard currently chairs the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate, is Chair of Trustees at Koestler Arts, which promotes rehabilitation through art in prisons, and Chair of the Advisory Committee for the Government Art Collection. He collects contemporary and twentieth-century paintings, drawings and ceramics. |
| Dr. Carol Atack | Carol Atack is a writer and researcher based at Newnham College in Cambridge where she is a fellow and Director of Studies in Classics. Her recent books include Plato: a civic life (2024), Xenophon (Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics, 2024), and The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece (2019), based on her Cambridge doctoral thesis. Her research interests include ancient Greek political thought and philosophy, the history of democracy, and the history of sexuality and gender. She has published many articles and chapters on fourth-century BCE Greek political thought and its contexts, on topics ranging from free speech to queer time. Her interests in art and material culture span from the ancient to the contemporary, echoing the extent of the Fitzwilliam’s collections. Earlier in her career Carol worked as a journalist and technical writer covering the emerging field of personal computers; publications from this period include The ARM Risc Chip: a programmer’s guide (1994).
https://newn.cam.ac.uk/person/carol-atack Carol is a member of the Finances and General Purposes Committee. |
| Dr Nicolas Bell | Dr Nicolas Bell is the Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he is also a Fellow and Tutor. Until 2015 he was a Curator at the British Library. He is President of the Bibliographical Society and General Secretary of the Henry Bradshaw Society, which publishes editions of medieval liturgical texts. He is a trustee of various charities including the Vaughan Williams Foundation and the Musica Britannica Trust, and a member of the Advisory Council of the Warburg Institute. He has served on the Fitzwilliam Syndicate since 2017 and has been a member of the Museum’s Collections Development Group since its establishment.
Nicolas is a member of the Collections Development Group. |
| Dr. Norman Fraser | Norman Fraser is a Cambridge-based entrepreneur with more than thirty years of experience in starting and building successful multinational businesses, including Vocalis Group plc (IPO London Stock Exchange, 1996) and Endava plc (IPO: New York Stock Exchange, 2018). Having started out in research, he has held a number of academic positions in parallel with his business career. He is currently Adjunct Professor in Aalborg Business School and a Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Norman is a member of the Museum’s Collections Development Group.
Norman Fraser is a member of the Museum’s Collections Development Group. |
| Adam Glinsman | A Graduate of the London School of Economics, and the University of Cambridge, Adam has over 30 years of experience in senior roles across the finance and investment industry, including Partner/COO of Lansdowne Partners, Partner/CEO of Cantab Capital Partners, and NED at the inception of Cambridge Innovation Capital, a University affiliated growth investor commercialising technology out of the Cambridge eco-system.
He is a former benefactor and Member of the Board of Trustees of the Cambridge Arts Theatre, current Patron of the Cambridge Literary Festival, benefactor to the LSE Scholarship Program, Maggie’s Cancer Centres and the Woolf Institute in Cambridge. Adam is a member of the Museum’s Finances and General Purposes Committee. |
| Prof. Alex Marr | Alexander Marr is Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern Art at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall, where he is Dean of Discipline. He is Head of the Department of History of Art and Co-Chair of the Faculty of Architecture and History of Art. He specializes in European and British art and architecture 1400-1800, especially their intellectual, literary, and scientific aspects. His awards include a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2008), a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (2013), and a Paul Mellon Centre Senior Fellowship (2022). He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, President of the Leonardo da Vinci Society, and a Trustee of the Walpole Society. He was the Founding Director of Cambridge Visual Culture (CVC). He delivered the Pharos Lectures in Oxford in 2024. His books include Holbein’s Wit: Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art (forthcoming), Rubens’s Spirit: From Ingenuity to Genius (2021); Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe (2018); Between Raphael and Galileo: Mutio Oddi and the Mathematical Culture of Late Renaissance Italy (2011); Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (2006). His current work is on Manet as an Old Master painter and on blankness in early modern global art. |
| Prof. Sujit Sivasundaram | Sujit is Professor of World History, in the Faculty of History, and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He specialises in the history Pacific and Indian oceans and their islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and also environmental history, the history of race, imperial history and history of science. His latest book is Waves Across the South: A New History of Revolution and Empire (2021), which won the British Academy Book Prize and the Bentley Book Prize in World History. He currently leads a ERC/UKRI collaborative research project on the long histories of the global South city as illustrated by the city of Colombo (colombohistories.org). He is a Member of the Nominations Committee. More details here:https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-sujit-sivasundaram.
Sujit is a member of the Nominations Committee. |
| Prof. Sir, John Aston | Professor Sir John Aston is the Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at the University of Cambridge and the Harding Professor of Statistics in Public Life.
John is an applied statistician with particular interest in statistical neuroimaging, official statistics and statistical linguistics. He has methodological interests in functional and object data analysis, time series and image analysis, and spatial-temporal statistics. John leads research into the use of quantitative evidence in public policy making, working with those in public life to ensure the best methods are used, and aims to improve the use of statistics and other quantitative evidence in public policy debates. John is a non-executive board member of the UK Statistics Authority and from 2017-2020 was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office and Director-General for Science, Technology, Analysis, Research and Strategy. He was a founding director of the Alan Turing Institute. He is a member of the London Policing Board and current President of the Royal Statistical Society. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Prior to Cambridge, John held academic positions at University of Warwick and at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. John was knighted in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to statistics and public policymaking. |
| William Dawkins | Will is a graduate of Cambridge University who chairs the Marlay Group, the Fitzwilliam Museum’s patrons’ organisation, and chairs the nominations committee of the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate. He has 25 years experience as a journalist, most of which was with the Financial Times, where he was a foreign correspondent based consecutively in Brussels, Paris and Tokyo, then Foreign Editor and Publishing Editor. He then spent 16 years as a headhunter, initially with Odgers then with Spencer Stuart, where he led the UK board and chief executive practice for 12 years. Will is a former chair and current trustee of the Evelyn Trust, a medical research grant giving charity, and a former governor of the Perse School.
Will chairs the Nominations Committee. |
| Prof. Dame Diane Coyle | Bennett Professor of Public Policy, University of Cambridge
Diane is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. She co-directs the Bennett Institute where she heads research under the themes of progress and productivity. Diane’s new book (April 2025) is The Measure of Progress: Counting what really matters. Her research focuses on productivity, the digital economy and digital policy, and economic measurement. She has been writing about the effects of digital technologies since her first book, The Weightless World, published in 1997. The underlying motivation for all her work is the question: what does it mean for the economy to improve, and who benefits? Diane is also a member of the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy Council, New Towns Taskforce, and advises the Competition and Markets Authority. She has served previously in a number of public service roles including as Vice Chair of the BBC Trust, member of the Competition Commission, and of the Natural Capital Committee. Diane was awarded a DBE in 2023 for her contribution to economics and public policy. Diane was a student at Brasenose College, Oxford, reading PPE (1978). She has a PhD in Economics from Harvard (1985). Diane is a member of the Nominations Committee, FURTHER INFORMATION CV: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/Diane_Coyle_-_CV.pdf Website: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/dianecoyle1859.bsky.social Personal blog: http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/ |
| The Countess of Derby | Cazzy is a historian, curator and storyteller. Born a Neville, married to a Stanley, she grew up on Audley End Estate before studying History and History of Art at London University and then working for a decade as Exhibitions Assistant to the Royal Collection. She married the 19th Earl of Derby in 1995 and they have 3 children. She is convinced that education and knowledge of history have the power to change lives. |
| Dr David Saunders | David is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the British Museum, where he was formerly Keeper of Conservation and Scientific Research. David is also an Honorary Researcher at the National Gallery London, where he worked from 1985 to 2005. In 2015–6 and 2024 he was a Guest Scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute and the inaugural Getty Rothschild Fellow in 2017. He was a visiting professor at the Institute for Sustainable Heritage, University College London in 2016–2021 and at the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2018 and 2021. David is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the International Institute for Conservation, on whose Council he has served since 2001, including two terms as vice-President.
David chairs the Hamilton Kerr Institute Advisory Board. |
To learn more about the Fitzwilliam Museum and its mission, visit the official website: https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk