Ingold was one of the most influential mycologists of the twentieth century and president of the British Mycological Society where he organized the first international congress of mycologists. Born in Blackrock, Dublin, Cecil Terence Ingold was awarded a first-class honours in Botany from Queen’s University Belfast in 1926.

In 1944 he was appointed to probably the foremost chair in the UK in the field of mycology at Birkbeck. The Department of Botany had been led to prominence since 1909 by Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, pioneer in fungal genetics, who was made Professor in 1921.

At Birkbeck, Ingold continued to take a major role in the undergraduate teaching and was joined in 1946 by his wartime Leicester student Bryan Plunkett as lecturer, who remained with him permanently thereafter.

Ingold retired from post at Birkbeck in 1972 and is best remembered for his discovery of an entirely new group of fungi – the aquatic hyphomycetes – of which more than 300 species are now recognized.

Caroline has dedicated her career to opening up access to higher education for people who have traditionally not been able to access university. She is a championing voice for tackling injustices that have attempted to prevent the communities Birkbeck serves from fully participating in and reaching their academic potential.

Caroline is the first Director of Access and Engagement at Birkbeck, a department that is truly committed to supporting and honoring Birkbeck’s founding principles. She is an advocate for mature learners within our community at Birkbeck and continuously supports initiatives to bring it to national attention, amongst HEI’s and governing bodies.

Caroline lends her time and expertise to a range of committees and departments at Birkbeck, to support initiatives from the Race Equality Charter, Birkbeck’s work with Trades Unions, to the Sanctuary initiative.

Caroline is a Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature and a co-founder of the award-winning open access journals publishing platform Open Library of Humanities with Professor Martin Eve, which officially launched in September 2015 with a $741,000 3-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

She is known for her advocacy in open access publishing. She is also a Founding and Commissioning Editor of the open access journal of 21st-century literary criticism, Alluvium.

Her research focuses on the utopian imagination in contemporary literature, science fiction, apocalyptic narratives, and Western Marxism.

She joined Birkbeck in September 2013 and was made a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in 2016. Caroline was also elected as Secretary of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies.

The biotech company Camilla Simpson leads, Zehna Therapeutics, is at the early stages of research into the links between the microbiome and heart and kidney disease. She says, “When the clinic was researching cardiovascular disease, they found that a microbial metabolite was present in many cases of these diseases. As such, we are now targeting the pathway that produces the metabolite so we can shut it down and therefore potentially prevent the progression of cardiovascular diseases and chronic kidney disease.”

Coming from a medical family, Camilla has striven to make people’s lives better through furthering medical research. She graduated with a Master’s in Analytical Chemistry in 1994, having already completed two undergraduate degrees in science and chemistry. Her Birkbeck studies gave her the confidence she needed in public speaking to really create a platform for women in science, technology and mathematics.

Now living in the United States, Camilla advises or sits on the board of multiple biomedical research companies.

Having struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia, dyspraxia and discalculia all his life and leaving school without full qualifications, Brooke Johnson applied to Birkbeck’s part-time BSc in Geology to pursue his ambition after disheartening experiences working in a call centre.

Brooke, a working-class student from Newcastle, excelled at Birkbeck once he got the diagnosis and support he needed, graduating with first class honours in 2015.

Since then, he has gone on to post-doctoral study and tutoring in earth sciences at the University of Oxford and has volunteered extensively with widening access programmes to help other working-class students develop a passion for geology and get into higher education.

He is now a sedimentary geology researcher at the University of Liège, Belgium.

Academic Registrar at Birkbeck for 30 years, Brian Harwood retired in 2008 and was then elected as a Fellow. He notably recalled the challenge of fighting government funding cuts through the 1980s, a situation that recurred more than once during his tenure.

Brian said that what made him stay so long at Birkbeck was recognising the value of adult education on students: “They were admirable – they were mature, the great majority of Birkbeck’s students had jobs, they did not have time to waste and they were business-like and courteous.”

During his time, the student body increased threefold. He established Birkbeck’s disability service, a vital department supporting students with disabilities, both visible and invisible and ensuring they were able to study without hindrance. The disability service continues to provide ongoing student support today

A lifelong equalities campaigner and former President of Birkbeck, Baroness Betty Lockwood was born in West Yorkshire in 1924. Her early educational experiences prepared her well for the presidency of Birkbeck, which she held from 1983-1989.

After studying at Eastborough Girls School, she continued her studies at night school. Then, with the support of a Mary Macarthur scholarship for working women, she read economics and politics at Ruskin College, Oxford.

In 1978, she was made a life peer. Her parliamentary roles included Chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission from 1975-83 and deputy Speaker of the House of Lords from 1990-2007.

Sir Bernard Crick was the founding professor of Birkbeck’s Department (later School) of Politics and Sociology in 1971.

Crick’s three early books, The American Science of Politics (1958), In Defence of Politics (1962) and The Reform of Parliament (1964) established his reputation. His best known work was George Orwell: A Life, published in 1980. Crick established the annual Birkbeck Orwell Lecture and the Orwell Prize for political writing.

For Crick, politics was “ethics done in public”. His aphorism was another way of saying that he was an enthusiastic advocate of the unity of theory and practice. The entire raison d’être of academic politics was to forge an engaged citizenry.

Crick retired from Birkbeck in 1984, moving to Edinburgh where he was appointed Honorary Fellow of the University. His enthusiasm for active citizenship led him to the educational plans for citizenship studies in school curricula, appointed to this task in 1997 by his former Sheffield student David Blunkett, then the Secretary of State for Education. He also devised education programmes for immigrants in UK citizenship and tests for candidates seeking British naturalisation. He was knighted in 2002.

The celebrity painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, was a staunch advocate for the arts and famous for his enthusiasm for reviving British history painting on vast canvases in the first half of the nineteenth century.

He gifted his wooden palette to Birkbeck in gratitude for “opening their doors to him when every other institution had the moral cowardice to close them”, which is still on display in the Blue Corridor in Malet St.

Haydon became well known as a lecturer, teaching art at Birkbeck in 1835. His classes were popular, often attracting hundreds of people, including one in which he brought along a model to pose nude for the duration of his lecture on the subject of the nude in art. He campaigned vigorously for the wider appreciation of art, contending that governments had a responsibility to buy works of artistic merit and to allow the general public, as opposed to patrons and connoisseurs only, to view them.

Pimlott joined the Department of Politics and Sociology in 1981 and, during his two decades at Birkbeck, published distinguished biographies on Hugh Dalton, Harold Wilson, and the Queen. Pimlott’s aim was to communicate the importance of politics beyond the academy.

For Pimlott, writing was a “mechanism for revolution”. His sensitivities towards the political sensibilities of the wider British public were revealed in the immediate aftermath of the death of Princess Diana. When Number Ten telephoned him in panic, asking “what can we do? what is the mood?”, Pimlott is reported to have responded “’we could call her the People’s Princess’, which was … what he had called Princess Elizabeth in The Queen”.

When Tony Blair used those words in his address to the nation, they became the touchstone for a nation in mourning.