Summer board meeting

At its summer meeting, our board meets our new finance director and discusses fundraising, core funding, research output and 23 challenges.

Our summer meeting of our Board of Trustees takes place in our rooms at the Royal Institution. Our board is joined by our development director, Sarah Myers Cornaby, our finance director, Ali Emamy, and our lead solicitor, Glynne Stanfield from Eversheds. As well as setting us up, Glynne set up the Turing Institute and the Crick Institute.

At this meeting, Sarah describes our efforts to raise funds for Junior Fellows, the expansion of our American networks and the Science Philanthropy Alliance. Ali, who started this week, is our first full-time finance director, and this meeting gives the board a chance to meet him. Glynne helped Dr Thomas Fink prepare a white paper for the government on how to get core funding to independent research organisations, and we discuss our five-year plan and our prospects for obtaining core funding. We are on track to boost our research output for 2021 by a factor of √2 over 2020. We measure our research output in SNIP points, described in our Journals page. To mark the launch of ARIA, we made a list of 23 mathematical challenges, which we will launch after this meeting.