The disability service at Birkbeck is an essential team working to support students with both visible and invisible disabilities. They ensure students can get reasonable adjustments, test for specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia, put study support plans in place to help students achieve their full potential and have also introduced Ability, a scheme that helps students with disabilities go on to their chosen career after graduation.  

Mark Pimm knows about the challenges faced by students with disabilities, being registered blind. He has written that before the passing of the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995, being a disabled student was much more difficult, something he experienced first-hand – there was no support or funding at all.  

Pimm’s work with the disability service is facilitated by his assistance dog and a sighted assistant who enable Mark to carry out his vital work day-to-day. As well as managing the disability service, he sits on the College’s Equality and Diversity Committee and voluntarily co-chairs the staff Disability Network, an inclusive forum offering talks and informal networking for disabled and non-disabled staff at Birkbeck. The network also advocates for disability rights and recognition, something Pimm has been assiduously passionate about since he first joined Birkbeck. 

Samir El-Youssef is a writer, commentator and peace activist who graduated with an MA Philosophy from Birkbeck in 2000. The Palestinian writer and critic was born in 1965 in Rashidia, a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, emigrated to Cyprus in 1989 and since 1990 has lived in London.  

He writes in both Arabic and English, and some of his work has been translated into German, Italian, Greek and Norwegian. Among his books is one co-written with the Israeli writer Etgar Keret, Gaza Blues: Different Stories. 

Julio Bruno is an international media, travel and entertainment executive with global leadership roles including as the former CEO for Time Out Group. He is also an award-winning advocate for diversity and inclusion. 

Julio studied for an International Business degree at Birkbeck and is an Advisory Board member for the Birkbeck/Central Saint Martins MBA. 

Julio founded his company, BR1 creative, at the end of 2021, working with the start-up community as an investor and board director, and as strategic advisor for a number of international companies. 

For his Diversity, Equity and Inclusion work, he has been selected in the 2021 Heroes Advocate Executive list, celebrating the Top 35 global leaders championing and advocating for women in the workplace; Top 50 EMpower Advocate Executive 2021 list of global leaders advocating for ethnic minorities; and Top 100 OUTstanding LGBT+ Role Model global list 2021. 

World-renowned computational chemist and drug designer Juswinder Singh received his PhD in computer-based drug design from Birkbeck shortly before moving permanently to the USA to pursue opportunities in experimental drug design. He is the founder and chief scientific officer of Ankaa Therapeutics, pioneering the development of targeted therapies to address drug resistance. 

In 2016, Juswinder was given the George and Christine Sosnovsky Award for Cancer Research by the American Cancer Society for leading the development of targeted covalent drugs, a transformative treatment for cancer patients. He also founded Avila Therapeutics in 2006, a company that won the 2013 New England Venture Captial Award. He has been cited over 3000 times in the field of rational drug design. 

Juswinder has said of Birkbeck that it is a great institution that “gives people opportunities through education.” 

Dr Kojo Koram is a Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. He joined Birkbeck in September 2018. Prior to taking up this role, he was a Lecturer at the School of Law at the University of Essex between 2016-2018. Prior to academia, Kojo worked in social welfare law, as well as youth work and teaching. 

He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2011 and then received his PhD in 2017. In 2018, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities awarded his PhD the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award for the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities. Alongside his academic work, Kojo has also written for publications as varied as the Guardian, The Washington Post, Nation, Dissent, The New Statesman and Critical Legal Thinking. 

Milica (Mil) Vukovic Smart is a London-based performance artist, writer and choreographer.  

Mil creates theatre-based and site-sensitive works across dance, performance and visual art.  

Memory, emotion and instability are some of her current preoccupations, and her work to date has been described as ‘cinematic’ and ‘strange & uncomfortable watching … in the best way’ (audience members, Rubicon, 2016) and ‘a glorious, fragmented mash up of contemporary, classical and found movement’ (HILT, Resolution Review 2018).  

Marinos Diamantides is Professor of constitutional law and political science. He first studied law in Greece and Spain before moving to the  UK where he obtained his LLM and PhD. He joined the Birkbeck Law Dept  in 1995 and has acted as HoD and Assistant Dean in the past. He is currently the Director of Studies at the Law Dept. 

Student, Nadia Krim shares, “At the start of my journey onto my law degree, I had a lack of confidence and could not understand much about constitutional and administrative law. I felt lost and almost wanted to give up. I shared my lack of confidence with Professor Marinos especially regarding my french accent and he reassured me straight away.  

“He was very attentive and extremely responsive to my queries and by following his advices, I eventually got to enjoy the module and greater my knowledge. Sometimes going beyond your job can have a great impact of someone’s life and that was the case for me. I am now a fully confident student being given the appropriate tool to succeed. Thank you Professor Marinos!” 

It was after experiencing trauma that left her comatose that Odessa Hamilton chose to study her BSc Business Psychology at Birkbeck. She overcame remarkable odds, learning not just the skills and knowledge required for her studies but also re-learning to walk, talk, read and write simultaneously. After graduating with first class honours, she became an alumni governor and has gone on to a successful academic career in behavioural science. 

Thrice accredited by the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health and the recipient of a full scholarship from the ESRC and BBSRC for her doctoral research in biobehavioural epidemiology and precision medicine, Odessa has credited Birkbeck with making her career possible. Upon her election to alumni governor at Birkbeck she said: “Having experienced the benefits of Birkbeck firsthand, I am truly passionate about advancing the College’s long-term mission to make education accessible for all.” 

Only 33 years old when he was appointed as Reader (and later Professor) of mathematics, Penrose was a leading person in the Birkbeck community until he left nine years later. His publication of “Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities” in 1965 was ground-breaking in its proof that a singularity in space-time would occur in the gravitational collapse of a massive star. He began his collaboration with Stephen Hawking while at Birkbeck, demonstrating that a singularity applied to the origin of the whole universe in the Big Bang. 

Penrose combined quantum mechanics with consciousness and gravity. Non-computability was crucial to his thinking. He was influenced by Bohm’s EPR paradox, which helped Penrose develop his “twistors” theory, or a non-local description of massless quantum particles. 

In 1988, he was awarded the Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics alongside Hawking, the most prestigious award in physics after the Nobel Prize. Penrose was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on gravitational collapse and space-time singularities, an idea that had first come to him when walking to his office in Birkbeck decades earlier. 

Tessa Blackstone served as a master at Birkbeck from 1987-1997 and reinstated the teaching of law at Birkbeck by inaugurating the department (now School of Law).  

Baroness Blackstone of Stoke Newington, a Labour peer and former Minister of State for both Education and Culture, began her academic career at the London School of Economics.  In 1975 she joined the Central Policy Review Staff, an independent unit within the Cabinet Office, before returning to academia as Professor of Educational Administration at the Institute of Education. 

This was followed by a post as Deputy Education Officer for the Inner London Education Authority, before becoming Master of Birkbeck in 1987. Her decade of leadership at Birkbeck ended when she took up an appointment with the new Labour government in 1997. She returned once again to academic life as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich in 2004, retiring in 2011.