Michael Fourman
Professor Michael Fourman is head of Edinburgh University’s school of informatics, which recently moved into a new £42m ($67m) Informatics Forum. Informatics is the study of how natural and artificial systems store, process and communicate information. Edinburgh’s school of informatics is rated as the top computing science school in the UK and among the top four in the world, and brings together 500 scientists interests spanning virtual reality, robotics, artificial learning, intelligent systems, computational linguistics and bioinformatics. Built over six floors around a central glass atrium, the 12,000 square metre forum has an open design to encourage interaction and collaboration between researchers, which is intended to promote world-class research and reflect the school’s reputation for commercialisation. The forum was designed by Bennetts Associates Architects and built by Balfour Beatty, with financial support from Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish government, the Wolfson Foundation and alumni.
Katherine Garrett-Cox
Katherine Garrett-Cox become the fifth female chief executive in the FTSE 100 in August when she stepped up to the top role at Alliance Trust, the Dundee-based international investment trust and financial services group. Nicknamed Katherine the Great during her early days heading US equities at Hill Samuel, Ms Garrett-Cox had surprised the City of London in 2007 by downsizing from her highly paid job as chief investment officer at Morley Fund Management, moving her husband and four children close to Dundee to become Alliance’s chief investment officer. She replaced Alan Harden, the American who left to become chief executive of ING Investment Management Asia/Pacific. Under his leadership, Alliance merged two sister funds and became the UK’s largest generalist fund. Ms Garrett-Cox intends to carry on with plans to roll out an asset management business in the next year, and says her childcare arrangements are “probably a little more complicated than fund management.”
