Lord Browne Biography

Roles and Leadership in Academia, the Arts and Philanthropy

Lord Browne is the independent Co-Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology, Chairman of the Francis Crick Institute, and Chairman of the Courtauld Institute of Art.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow and Past President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the founding Chair of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, serving for more than a decade from 2012 to 2024. Lord Browne is a past Chair of the Cambridge Judge Business School and past member of the International Advisory Board of the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford.

He is a member of the Advisory Board of the Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management and Emeritus Chair and current member of the Advisory Council of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

Lord Browne served as Chairman of Tate for a decade and is a past Chairman of the Donmar Warehouse.

Lord Browne also serves as a trustee of the Royal Opera House and the Holocaust Educational Trust. He is the Chairman of the John Browne Charitable Trust which supports a wide range of causes in the arts, science and engineering, education, the environment and human rights. He is also the Chairman of the Beaufort Society, the legacy society of St John’s College, Cambridge. 

Career

Lord Browne is the co-Founder and Chairman of BeyondNetZero, General Atlantic’s climate growth equity fund. The fund’s strategy is to invest in companies that contribute to the energy transition by reducing end-to-end costs; improving operational efficiency; reducing strategic risks and improving resilience; and enabling the development of new energy sources.

He currently serves as Chairman of Avathon, an artificial intelligence technology company, and Chairman of Carbonplace, a global carbon credit transaction network. He also serves on the board of Venterra, an offshore wind energy services company which is part of BeyondNetZero’s investment portfolio.

After retiring from BP in 2007, Lord Browne joined Riverstone, where he was co-head of a $3.4 billion renewable energy private equity fund, the world’s largest at the time. He was subsequently Executive Chairman of L1 Energy.

He has previously served on the boards of Goldman Sachs, Intel, SmithKline Beecham, and DaimlerChrysler.

From 2010 to 2015 he served as the UK Government first lead Non-Executive Director, working with Secretaries of State to appoint Non-Executive Directors to the board of each government department. In 2010, the report of an independent inquiry headed by Lord Browne was published under the title Securing a Sustainable Future for Higher Education, making recommendations for a more sustainable system of higher education funding.

Education and Honours 

Lord Browne received an MA in Natural Sciences from St. John’s College, Cambridge, and an MS in Business from Stanford. He was knighted in 1998 and entered the House of Lords as a Crossbench Peer in 2001. He is the author of five books.