JJ Bola is a writer, poet and advocate for refugees. His second novel, The Selfless Act of Breathing, interrogates  themes through the lens of mental health and is being adapted into a feature-length film.

After arriving in the UK as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and growing up on a council estate, JJ worked as a youth worker, supporting young people with behavioural and mental health problems. He privately maintained a passion for writing, crafting poetry in his spare time.

JJ pursued his talent by studying Creative Writing at Birkbeck. He has since published further poetry collections and novels that incorporate themes from his family background and experience as a youth worker: “I’m fortunate to have a unique lens on the world that reflects my many conflicting identities — refugee, anglophone, francophone, Black, working-class. With my work, I hope to offer an alternative perspective on issues across lines of race, class, ethnicity and sexuality.”

JJ is also a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Ambassador and advocates for the importance of education in society.

John Desmond was one of the most eminent scientists in molecular biology and is widely regarded as the founding father of the science of science, the sociohistorical study of science. He would go on to pioneer the use of x-ray crystallography but his interests took him beyond the field of science to socio-political issues.

The physicist, nicknamed “Sage” for his encyclopaedic knowledge, was appointed professor of physics at Birkbeck College, London in 1938 but at the onset of the Second World War he was called for service duties. After the war, John Desmond resumed his professorial duties at Birkbeck, setting up the Biomolecular Research Laboratory in 1948.

As well as groups working on organic crystals and proteins, he had others working on computers, the structure of cements (buildings and building materials were a life-long interest), and the structure of water. Rosalind Franklin later joined him to start work on virus structure, which she continued with Aaron Klug.

Driven by political and sociological developments, Irish-born John Desmond, a Marxist, co-founded the World Peace Council and during the second world war, encouraged the College to introduce midday lectures aimed at the general public to reverse what he called the “intellectual blackout in London”.

Isobel Armstrong has been one of the most powerful, dynamic and inspirational figures in literary and cultural studies over the last three decades. In 1989 Birkbeck recruited her from Southampton for the then Department of English at Birkbeck. She oversaw a period of unprecedented renewal and expansion for the Department of English.

Since the time she joined, English has doubled in size according to every measure. Her impact was felt far beyond the Department of English. She established a Master’s course in Gender, Society and Culture, the first cross-faculty Master’s course in the College. In 1995, she also began an important initiative to develop the recruitment and support of international students in the College.

Her book Victorian Poetry appeared in 1993 and immediately established itself as the one completely indispensable book on the field. She published an anthology entitled Nineteenth-Century Women Poets, coedited with Joseph Bristow, which changed the face of nineteenth-century literary studies, making available the work of dozens of fine, fascinating female poets that had previously been forgotten and inaccessible to students.

After a ten-day solo journey from war-torn Aleppo, Syria, to Calais, Ishmael Hamoud spent 13 months in the Calais jungle alongside thousands of other migrants. Eventually, the Dubs Amendment (a policy by Lord Alf Dubs, himself a child refugee in WWII) allowed him legal passage to the UK and secured him a home with foster parents.

Ishmael applied to Birkbeck’s Compass project, allowing him to study a fully funded Access to Higher Education course, where he studied hard and proved bright enough to progress directly into the second year of a Bachelor’s in Global Politics and International Relations.

He has been interviewed on British TV about his experiences and undertaken work experience in Parliament with Lord Dubs. He has said: “I eventually want to become a politician, like my father. My dream job would be working for the British Foreign Office in Middle East Policy.”

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.