Forced to leave school without completing her A-levels due to the onset of epileptic seizures, Isabella Ghawi enrolled on a Certificate of Higher Education at Birkbeck before going on to achieve a first class in her Bachelor’s in Biomedicine in 2020.

She faced significant ill health and was supported by the College’s disability service throughout her studies for her epilepsy, a brain tumour and dyslexia. She has praised the academic and disability service staff for ensuring she was able to continue studying: “With the help of all those people, I was able to continue and not just able to continue, but to really excel and exceed my expectations despite many difficulties.”

Isabella also founded the Birkbeck Biological Society, a special interest student academic group.

Hilda Keet, the first female administrator employed at Birkbeck, fulfilled her role as secretary with dedication, skill and sensitivity. For four years during the First World War, it was said to be “natural and even inevitable” that Miss Keet would take over the duties of the College Secretary when he left for war-work.

Near the end of the war, when the Principal lost most of his sight, it became “one of Miss Keet’s self-imposed duties and, no doubt, incidentally, pleasures” to walk him home after work. However, once the war was over, Miss Keet was unceremoniously stripped of her duties as the unofficial College Secretary and reverted to the usual chores of the “typewriter”.

Her career as ‘typewriter’ started in 1906 and she retired in 1949, when a rather patronising article in her honour was published in The Lodestone: Miss Keet’s job was “normal office routine work”, the “meticulous care” she “lavished” upon the academic staff meant that “they began to think of more and more things that they wanted to have done”.

Keet also worked for the Students’ Union and took an evening degree at Birkbeck.

Hetan is the Chief Executive of The British Academy, the United Kingdom’s national academy for the humanities and the social sciences, which he leads with insight, energy, and a talent for making a difference in the world in which we all live. He is also an alumnus of Birkbeck.

Hetan studied at Birkbeck between 2000 and 2002 for his degree in Contemporary History and Politics, where he studied (amongst other topics), Soviet history, politics and development in post-colonial societies, empire and the state, and population movements, minorities and genocide.

The following year, he followed his MA by doing a Birkbeck postgraduate certificate in economics. It was during this time that he honed some of the skills that were to become so important in his later career.

Professor Helen Saibil is a molecular biologist and the Bernal professor of structural biology in Birkbeck’s School of Natural Sciences.

Her research is largely focused on molecular chaperones and protein misfolding.

Saibil completed undergraduate studies at McGill University in 1971 followed by a PhD at King’s College London, receiving her thesis in 1977 entitled Diffraction studies of retinal rod outer segment membranes. Saibil went on to work at CEA Grenoble and the University of Oxford. Saibil has been at Birkbeck since 1989, and was elected to the Royal Society in 2006 and the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2009.

While her current role is in entrepreneurship education, Harveen Chugh’s first academic passion was in molecular biology. Since graduating from Birkbeck with a Bioinformatics Master’s, she has gone on to teach at Royal Holloway, Imperial College London and the University of Warwick, as well as to co-found the Network for Coaching and Mentoring Entrepreneurs.

Alongside this, she continues to work on entrepreneurial development activities at Birkbeck and has worked on the Pioneer programme, Birkbeck’s enterprise development initiative, and the Ability programme, Birkbeck’s career development support initiative for students who are neurodiverse or have a disability.

On her work with budding entrepreneurs, Harveen has said, “What drew me to the area is the mindset you can create by encouraging entrepreneurs’ new ideas and innovation … With a little bit of a nudge or guidance in the right direction, those can really go somewhere.”

Harren is a structural biologist and co-founder of Astex Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of drugs in oncology and diseases of the central nervous system.

As Chief Scientific Officer and then President and CEO, Harren built up Astex to become one of the world’s leading drug discovery and development companies. Before founding Astex in 1999, he was head of Structural Biology and Bioinformatics at GlaxoWellcome (now GlaxoSmithKline) in the UK.

Harren came to Birkbeck’s world-renowned crystallography department and in 1986, completed his MSc in X-ray Crystallography, followed just three years later with his PhD. He is famous for applying crystallography to drug design.

Harren’s scientific achievements have been recognised by the Royal Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Society of Biology and The Academy of Medical Sciences. He has also received the UK Bioindustry Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019, he was made a Fellow of Birkbeck.

Gilane is a writer and curator and a passionate advocate for the value of the arts to society with thirty years’ experience in the visual arts.

She established the first education programmes at the Hayward Gallery in the 1990s and in 2008, studied for a Master’s in Human Rights at Birkbeck, exploring questions of rights and representation in the work of contemporary artists.

She is a founding Trustee and Chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation, an organisation committed to public education, addressing urgent questions of race and inequality in culture and society through its public education programme and by providing opportunities for activism and intellectual inquiry amongst artists, scholars, and activists from under-represented groups.

She was the first art historian to be appointed to the Blanche, Edith and Irving Laurie Chair in Women’s Studies, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey, USA and in 2021 published the anthology The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon: Global Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Difference.

Armitage-Smith arrived at Birkbeck in 1896, and over the course of the next 22 years, transformed the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution into Birkbeck College, University of London.

Armitage-Smith initiated a massive programme of restructuring, spurred on by a new generation of students and staff who were clamouring for reform. Armitage-Smith was the first Principal to be paid as a full-time Head of the college and he reciprocated by introducing a system of salaries for lecturers, when previously they had received directly the fees students paid for attending their classes.

Armitage-Smith also grouped the dozens of individual classes for the first time into some semblance of the faculty system we recognise today. He argued for Birkbeck’s joining the University of London to educate the ordinary citizens of London, as in contrast to Oxbridge, it should be a “people’s university.”

Affectionately known as Croicks, Ste Croix taught part-time at Birkbeck from 1950 to 1953, before moving to New College Oxford. He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and was to remain a committed Marxist and atheist all his life.

During his time at Birkbeck, Ste Croix composed one of his classic articles, “The Character of the Athenian Empire” (1954), which was to dwell on themes that continued throughout his career, including slavery, persecution, democracy, the poor, and the baneful impact of Christianity.

In the article, he contrasts two very different meanings of the Greek word δημοκρατία. According to one meaning, the whole people are sovereign; in the other, sovereignty resided with the mass of poor people. The government by all citizens was the definition employed by democrats. Government by the poor was the way oligarchs defined it, in Marxist terms, the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

He was, according to his own reckoning, “politely militant”.

Born in 1771 to the tavern-keeper at the King’s Arms in Arundel Street, Francis Place worked hard and read widely. At 17 he became an independent journeyman breeches-maker, eventually setting himself up in Charing Cross. Despite living in poverty with his wife, a former servant, Place believed in education and self-improvement. He worked 14 hours daily after which he would spend hours reading the most radical authors of his time.

Also known as the ‘Radical Tailor of Charing Cross,’ Place was an atheist and political activist. Place saw the London Mechanics Institute as facilitating upward social mobility for working men. As he informed readers of The Republican in 1826, he was “saved” from “a life of misery” “by precisely such teaching as journeymen may receive in Mechanics’ Institutions”.