Speakers

Speaker profile

Dorothy Byrne is the President of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, a college for women. She took up the role in 2021. Under her leadership, the College has played a leading role in championing girls and women in STEM, particularly in physics, engineering, maths and computer science where they are underrepresented nationally and revealed a significant gender attainment gap in these subjects at Cambridge. In 2023, she announced the College, teaming up with AstraZeneca was launching an entrepreneurship scheme which would be open to all women students and recent alumnae across Cambridge.

Prior to joining the College, Dorothy was Editor at Large at Channel 4, a role that was specially created for her when she stepped down as Head of News and Current Affairs after 15 years. During her time at Channel 4, Dorothy was responsible for news and current affairs programmes which have had a national and global impact, winning numerous Royal Television Society, BAFTA and Emmy awards.

Dorothy was made a Fellow of the Royal Television Society for her ‘outstanding contribution to television’.  She also won the BBC Grierson Trustees Award for contribution to documentary at the British Documentary Awards; received the Outstanding Contribution Award at the Royal Television Society Journalism Awards; was awarded a BAFTA Scotland Award for Outstanding Contribution to Television; and won the Women in Film and Television Award for contribution to television.

Dorothy continues to work in international documentary. She was Executive Producer of Leaving Neverland, The Hunt for Jihadi John, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, The Ballymurphy Precedent, The Man Putin Couldn’t Kill, and Island of Secrets, a film about sex abuse in the Falklands. She has recently been Executive Producer of a three-part series about Ghislaine Maxwell and the two-Part series Spacey Unmasked.

In 2019, Dorothy delivered the prestigious MacTaggart lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in which she criticised politicians for lying and failing to be held to account.

In 2023 she delivered the James Cameron Memorial Lecture.