Julia Mary Black is the Strategic Director of Innovation and a Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science She was the interim Director of the LSE, a post she held from September 2016 until September 2017, at which time Minouche Shafik took over the Directorship. She is the President-elect of the British Academy, the UK's national academy for the humanities and social sciences, and will become the Academy's second female President in July 2021 for a four-year term.
Black is Strategic Director of Innovation, Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the General Editor of the Modern Law Review. She was the LSE's Pro Director for Research from 2014-19 and interim Director of the LSE from 2016-17. She is also a research associate of the LSE's Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulation and has been actively involved with developing the LSE’s research collaborations with STEM disciplines, particularly around health and data science. She has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 2015 and the President-elect since 2020. She will become the Academy's second female President in the Academy’s 118-year history, taking up the role in July 2021 for a four-year term and becoming the 31st President. She will be succeeding the historian Professor Sir David Cannadine. Previously, she was a lecturer and tutor at the University of Oxford, the recipient of a British Academy / Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney and at All Souls College, Oxford. In 2014, she was the Sir Frank HolmesVisiting Professorin Public Policy at the University of Victoria, Wellington. She has also received grants from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Social Science Research Council and was the recipient of the 2016 Standing Group Award for Regulatory Studies Development. She has written extensively on regulatory issues in a number of areas, including financial regulation and was a part of a high-level steering group of experts working on a review of the Research Excellence Framework chaired by former President of the British Academy and World Bank Chief Economist, Lord Nicholas Stern. The independent review, which was published in 2016, was designed to make recommendations on how the REF worked in future. In the same year, she was also a member of the British Academy’s working group on interdisciplinary research, which examined how interdisciplinary research is carried out, the demand for it and whether the right structures are in place to support interdisciplinarity across the research and higher education system. Outside of academia, Black has had a number of non-executive and advisory roles for many organisations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the UK National Audit Office, the Solicitors Regulation Authority, the Financial Services Authority, and the Law Commission. At the SRA, she was an independent board member from 2014-2018 and chaired its Policy Committee. Currently, she is an external member of the Prudential Regulation Committee and an external member of the SONIA Oversight Committee at the Bank of England, with the term of her appointment running from November 2018 to November 2021. She has been a Senior Independent Member of UK Research and Innovation, which is responsible for research and innovation funding in the UK, since 2017 and is also a member of the Council of Science and Technology, which advises the Prime Minister on science and technology policy issues across government, and recently joined the Board of Governors of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Due to her work over the years, Julia Black was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to the study of law and regulation.
