Buckingham’s Honorary Graduates

Sir Ben Kingsley’s film career began in 1972 with the thriller Fear is the Key, directed by Michael Tuchner. His first major role came a decade later in Gandhi, for which Sir Ben earned an Academy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, and two BAFTA Awards for his riveting portrayal of the Indian social leader Mahatma Gandhi.

Sir Ben Kingsley has continued to bring unequalled detail and nuance to each role he portrays. Eleven years after “Gandhi”, Kingsley starred in Steven Spielberg’s historical Holocaust drama, Schindler’s List. An extensive list of award-winning roles continues to this day.

In 1984, he was awarded the Padma Sri by Indira Gandhi and the government of India. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the New Year’s Eve Honors List 2002. Sir Ben was honored in 2014 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with its National Leadership Award, recognizing his exceptional contributions to keeping the Holocaust memory alive.

Sir Ben stars in the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe series Wonder Man, opposite Demetrius Grosse, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Ed Harris for Disney+. Once again, Kingsley will reprise his role as Trevor Slattery, the failed actor turned villain, which he originated in Iron Man 3 and reprised in Shang-Chi. Created by Destin Daniel Cretton and inspired by the Marvel comic books of the same name, the series follows Hollywood actor Simon Williams as he is thrust into the world of superheroes and becomes “Wonder Man”.

Mary Curnock Cook is an independent education expert serving in a non-executive capacity on a number of Boards.

From 2010-2017, Mary was Chief Executive of UCAS. Earlier in her career she held executive and non-executive positions in the education, hospitality, food and biotech sectors.

As a NED with Pearson Education, Mary chairs its Qualifications Committee and also chairs the governing body of the Dyson Institute. She is a non-exec Director at the London Interdisciplinary School, the Student Room and Education Cubed, and a Trustee at the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and the River Learning Trust. She recently served as a non-exec on the Student Loans Company Board.

She has the role of Network Chair for Emerge Education, the leading edtech investor in Europe and holds a number of advisory roles with education technology companies. She is a regular speaker and commentator on education issues and edtech, and is a recognised champion of the student interest.

Mary has an MSc from London Business School and was awarded an OBE in 2000, and a CBE in 2020 for services to further and higher education. She is an honorary Fellow of Birkbeck and Goldsmiths and has an honorary doctorate from the University of Gloucestershire.

Mr Halls attended a Birmingham comprehensive school before reading English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a double first.

From 1998 until 2008, Mr Halls was Master of Magdalen College School, Oxford, and from 2008 until 2021, Mr Halls was Head Master of King’s College School, Wimbledon.

King’s College School, Wimbledon, was placed as top boys’ or co-ed school across the three pre-Covid years 2017-2019 in the Sunday Times table published in December 2021. His previous school, MCS Oxford, was placed second in the same table. Mr Halls remains the only headteacher to win the title of Sunday Times Independent School of the Year at two different schools.

In 2021, he was elected Honorary Principal of King’s College International School, Bangkok, a school he helped found, and appointed Director of the Record Scholarship Trust, a charity enabling bright children from a range of backgrounds to attend leading independent schools.

From September 2024, he will be Headmaster of Whitgift School, South Croydon, for one year.

Mr Halls has a broad interest in UK education, helping establish King’s College London Maths School, and advising governors of various leading schools on headteacher appointments and strategy. He was at one point a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times, and, in 2020, was awarded an OBE for services to education. He also lectures on Charles Dickens in the USA and UK.

Mr Halls is married with two daughters.

President of the 78th Session of the United Nations General Assembly

Ambassador Dennis Francis has had a career spanning approximately 40 years in the Diplomatic Service of Trinidad and Tobago. For 18 of those years of unbroken service, he held the rank of ambassador until his compulsory retirement from career service in 2016. According to Mr. Francis, he has the distinction of being his country’s longest-serving ambassador. Before demitting office as Director of Multilateral Relations, he functioned as Senior Adviser to the Minister for Foreign Affairs on all multilateral-level matters, including climate change and the negotiations on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

His transfer back to Port of Spain in 2011 capped Ambassador Francis’ posting as Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Geneva, as well as Permanent Representative to the World Trade Organization and to the UN Human Rights Council. He was also accredited concurrently to the U.N. Specialized Agencies in Vienna and Rome, besides having bilateral accreditation as Ambassador to Austria and Italy. Ambassador Francis was also appointed Permanent Delegate to UNESCO.

In 2010 at a period of renewed engagement in Multilateral Trade Negotiations, Ambassador Francis was elected to the sensitive Chairmanship of the Negotiating Group on Rules of the WTO, namely Anti-Dumping, Subsidies and Countervailing Duties and Fisheries Subsidies. He also served as Chairman of the Committee on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights in Regular Session as well as Chairman of the Commonwealth Group of Developing Countries (2007/8).

He has led many national delegations including to the First Universal Periodic Review of Trinidad and Tobago in the UN Human Rights Council in October 2011 and to UNCTAD 12, which was held in Accra, Ghana in 2008.

Ambassador Francis’ assignment in Geneva in 2006 followed a seven-year tour of duty as High Commissioner of Trinidad and Tobago to Jamaica and Permanent Representative to the International Seabed Authority. During this period, Ambassador Francis was also accredited as Ambassador (non-resident) to the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba. When he demitted office in Jamaica, he had held the position of Dean of the Diplomatic Corps for almost two years. Ambassador Francis took an active interest in the issues before the International Seabed Authority, leading to his election to the Chairmanship of the Assembly in 2003.

In July of 2021, he completed a three-year assignment as Chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago National Commission for UNESCO.

Ambassador Francis co-facilitated a training course entitled “Protocol and Diplomacy: A Guide for the Modern Professional,” at the Diplomatic Academy of the Caribbean; an institution in the conceptualization of which he was intimately involved as Lead Technical Adviser to the Foreign Minister. In 2018, Ambassador Francis also co-authored a book entitled “Heads of Mission-A Handbook,” which has received regional and international acclaim. In 2020, Ambassador Francis returned to The University of the West Indies, his alma mater, as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Relations at the St. Augustine Campus. He is also a graduate of The School of Advanced International Studies, the Johns Hopkins University in Washington DC. (1985).

Ambassador Francis is married to his best friend, Joy Thomas-Francis and they have three adult sons.

Dr Nighat is a GP specialising in women’s health, family planning and menopause care with over 16 years of experience in the NHS, and she runs her own private practice.

She is the resident Doctor on BBC Breakfast and ITV This Morning. She is a health content creator working with YouTube Health and the WHO Fides programme.

Dr Nighat is the Ambassador for Wellbeing of Women and the recipient of the 2023 Prime Ministers ‘Point of Light’ Award in recognition of her work of raising awareness of Women’s Health issues in the UK.

Dr Nighat was awarded an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. In September 2023, Dr Nighat formed The Health Collective in partnership with Dame Leslely Regan to help map grassroots organisations in the UK to ensure equitable access to healthcare and appropriate nuanced policies as part of Women’s Health Strategy. Alongside this she is the Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire.

Dr Nighat is the author of her debut bestselling book “The Knowledge. Your guide to female health from Menstruation to the Menopause”. It is a fully illustrated, inclusive book for all things Women’s Health, and her extensive clinical work has been featured in HELLO!, The Times, GOOD Housekeeping and British Vogue.

Jonathan Sumption (Lord Sumption) began his career as an academic historian and a Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford before leaving in 1975 to go to the bar.

He became QC in 1986, and developed a prominent practice in public, constitutional and commercial law. In January 2012 he was appointed directly from the bar to the Supreme Court, one of only five people to have gone straight to the top court since 1873. As a Justice of the Court he has delivered major judgments on public and commercial law, on freedom of the press, and on international law among other subjects.

Lord Sumption retired from the Court on reaching the statutory age in December 2018. Since then he has been an active non-party commentator of constitutional affairs. His BBC Reith Lectures for 2019 (Law and the Decline of Politics) have proved highly influential.

In parallel with an active legal career, Lord Sumption has maintained his long-standing engagement with historical scholarship, writing a number of books on medieval history, including a five-volume history of the Hundred Years War, completed in 2023. The third volume (Divided Houses) was awarded the Wolfson History Prize for 2009.

Rob Merkin is currently part-time Research Professor of Commercial Law at Reading University, having retired from full time academic life three years ago after 45 years of lecturing at Universities including Exeter, Southampton and Cardiff. Rob’s specialisms are insurance, reinsurance and arbitration, which he has taught not just in the UK but also in Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Singapore, Hong Kong and China. He is the author of over 50 books and numerous articles, and his writings have been cited as authoritative by courts worldwide on well over 200 occasions, some thirty in 2023 alone. Rob also edits the Lloyd’s Law Reports and the Journal of Business Law.

Rob has served as Vice-President and then President of the British Insurance Law Association, and is Honorary Life President of the International Association of Insurance Law (AIDA). He has received a number of awards for his contribution to academic life, and was appointed as honorary King’s Counsel in 2015. He has been consultant to the UK Parliament and the Australian Royal Commission on Financial Services, and is currently advising the New Zealand governments insurance law reform.

He regularly gives presentations to both academic and practitioner audiences, has had a number of arbitrator appointments in England, Singapore and Hong Kong, regularly advises both insurers and law firms and is also Special Counsel to New Zealand law firm Duncan Cotterill. These days, his real love is legal history, and he is most proud of his two volume work Marine Insurance, A Legal History published at the end of 2021.

I read Classics at Cambridge University, though in truth focussed more on playing rugby! I worked at Bain and Company for three years before helping set up Charles Tyrwhitt Shirts. We assembled an amazing team, who were much more talented than I was and have taken the business to £325mm turnover with a healthy profit. I left full time work in 2005 and have Chaired many small multi-channel retailers grow into much bigger businesses, achieving a few exits, such as Cath Kidston £106mm and £250mm and ME+EM £135mm. I have always said that I made so many mistakes at CT, that I was able to stop similar businesses making the same mistakes. I recently became Chair of Renais, a premium gin business, founded by Alex and Emma Watson.

However the two things I enjoy most are:

1. Speaking about entrepreneurship in schools, to encourage the next wave of bright students to become entrepreneurs – the UK needs them!
2. Speaking in the same schools about the charity Mary’s Meals, whose mission is to feed any child in poverty if they come to school. We feed about 2.5mm children every day thanks to the money the students raise.

After graduating from the University of Economics, Budapest in 1978, László Láng completed his doctorate at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1985. Until the early 1990s, he conducted research, published and lectured extensively on topics related to global geopolitics and geoeconomics at independent research organizations in Hungary and New York, USA. As acting head of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs during Hungary’s regime change, he established a highly regarded platform for the international contacts and foreign policy discussions of the emerging new political forces.

After that, he held a number of board positions in Hungarian state banks before privatization, as well as in the country’s airlines and railroads. His banking career climaxed between 1997 and 2000 when as CEO of a commercial bank in Vienna, Austria, in accordance with the owner’s strategic goal, he successfully liquidated an organization with internationally dispersed, low-quality assets of over €500 million.

His crisis management skills were put to good use once again from 2003 when he was appointed first CEO and then Rector of International Business School, Budapest, a private university in Budapest with a student body of 1300. In close-knit, validation-based collaboration with UK universities, and in particular with The University of Buckingham over the past 11 years, Dr Láng has created an academically and financially strong, highly internationalized, agile and flexible provider of dual, undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate degree programmes for students from some 80 countries of the world

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