Kate Bingham

Bingham was born in London, the only daughter of the barrister and judge Tom Bingham (later Lord Bingham of Cornhill) and Elizabeth ( Loxley) and the eldest of their three children. She attended St Paul's Girls' School, London, before going on to study at the University of Oxford where she was an undergraduate student of Christ Church, Oxford. She graduated with a first-class MA in biochemistry. She has an honorary doctorate from Imperial College London. ==Career==

Bingham worked in business development for Vertex Pharmaceuticals and consultants Monitor Company before joining Schroder Ventures in 1991 (now SV Health Investors). She became a managing partner specializing in biotechnology, and has served on the boards of companies in the UK, US, Ireland, Sweden and Germany. As of January 2021, Bingham is listed as being a director of the following active companies: and SV Health Managers LLP. She also serves on the boards of the Francis Crick Institute HM Government appointment In May 2020, Bingham was appointed chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, without a competitive recruitment process. The taskforce was set up to manage the path towards the introduction of a COVID-19 vaccine in the UK and its global distribution. In this temporary unpaid role, which finished at the end of the year, Her work on the UK's vaccination rollout programme has been praised by scientists and international media, In his 2024 memoir Unleashed, Johnson wrote that criticism of this expenditure was unwarranted because "she was in fact trying to gauge public sentiment about vaccines – an absolutely crucial consideration given some of the challenges we were to face in the subsequent roll-out". Dame Kate's account of the risks, criticism and political interference she faced are discussed in her book The Long Shot which was published in October 2022 with all proceeds going to the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering. In this, she detailed the need for a specialist health communications capability to launch a national Vaccines Registry which was a core part of the vaccine procurement and development strategy and that this was contracted by the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy. Awards and honours In 2016, Bingham received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bath. In January 2017, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the BioIndustry Association UK. Bingham was also admitted to the Freedom of the City of London in that year. She was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2023 and was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering later the same year. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and holds honorary fellowships from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Medicine and the British Pharmacological Society ==Views on science policies==

Bingham has expressed views on how the UK covid vaccination programme could have been better run, and on how UK potential in life sciences could be improved. She published her account of the seven months she spent chairing the Vaccine Taskforce in her book The Long Shot, in which she shared lessons for future pandemics and offered advice on how government could work more successfully with industry. ==Personal life==

Bingham married Jesse Norman in 1992; the couple have two sons and a daughter. Norman is a Conservative Party politician and a member of Parliament since 2010, who held various ministerial posts from 2016 to 2023. ==References==