About Zoë
Background
Zoë is the Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London, a Visiting Professor at the University of Cumbria, and an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck College. She holds five degrees, including two doctorates, from the universities of Newcastle on Tyne, Leicester, Warwick, and Henley Business School.
After her first degree in history, archaeology and literature, Zoë began her career teaching in an inner-city comprehensive school, before moving into further and higher education. As a senior civil servant, she had national responsibility for the Department of Education and Science programme supporting universities in engaging with the professions, industry, and commerce. In the 1980s, Zoë joined the University of Warwick as Head of Continuing Vocational Education and Chief Executive of the university’s business consortium.
From 1993 onwards, Zoë was Professor of Postgraduate Medical Education at the University of London and Head of Education at NHS Regional Postgraduate Medical and Dental Deanery for Kent, Surrey, and Sussex. Her department’s keynote work included creating the national Medical Careers Service; developing educational quality assurance systems for postgraduate medicine; innovative Masters’ degrees in education and in leadership in clinical settings; the collaborative development of Applied Medical Humanities as a new discipline; and instituting new approaches to medical simulation.
Concurrently, for over thirty years Zoë has worked pro bono in the front lines of LGBTI human rights. A former co-Chair of the Gay and Lesbian Association of Doctors and Dentists [GLADD], in 1994 she co-founded the Parliamentary Forum on Gender Identity with Dr Lynne Jones MP. Following her successful work with legal teams that won landmark cases for trans and gay civil liberties, she acted as adviser to the NHS, Home Office, and Department of Education and Employment.
Zoë continues to research, teach, and advise in a range of cross-disciplinary areas. Her commercial consultancy clients include the Standing Conference on Postgraduate Medical Education, the Royal College of Anaesthetists, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and a range of small businesses, charitable trusts, and public sector bodies.
Interests
Zoë has a strong inter-disciplinary academic background and broad senior professional experience, through which she has honed her particular skill of making complex ideas simple and accessible. She is an original thinker, with an extensive record of innovation in practice-based contexts: medicine, the law, government, academia. Drawing on her cross-sector top team experience, Zoë enjoys engaging with policy analysis and formation, especially in collaborative settings. In her writing, she is accustomed to working in a range of formats, ranging from, for example, the highly disciplined configuration required for government guidelines; the bewildering range of styles required by different journals; the story-telling composition needed to make conference papers interesting; the word restrictions of ‘editor’s letters’; the academic rigours of formal research; and the more relaxed tones required by material for a wider readership.
In her spare time, Zoë paddles, bakes and travels.
