Dr Suzy Walton

Dr Suzy Walton is the former Vice-President of the Royal Society of Medicine and the former Deputy Chair of the Royal Society of Arts. She has also been Deputy Chair of the University of Westminster and the Internet Watch Foundation – an organisation seeking to eradicate child sexual abuse from the internet.

No stranger to corporate governance, Suzy has sat on the boards of over 15 major organisations including Birmingham Children’s Hospital and ACCA which is the global regulator for the accountancy profession. For ACCA, she also chaired the global Qualifications Board. Suzy’s longest stint on a board has been for the Institute of Directors, where she served for almost a decade until 2022. She has also been a member of the HEFCE council – the former regulator of universities.

Suzy has had an unconventional and unique career.

She left her home town of Nottingham aged 16. She found herself (mostly by luck rather than design) playing the leading role of Lydia the young deaf girl in the award-winning West End show “Children of a Lesser God.” She was with the show for three years.

She then worked as a broadcaster. She was a producer and presenter for Sky News and BBC Television. For several years she also had her own travel programme – Time Off on LBC Radio for which she was the producer, presenter and editor.

Arriving at university somewhat ‘late’ Suzy then achieved BSc and MSc degrees and a career followed as a Senior Civil Servant. She worked in the Ministry of Defence, the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. She has fond memories of her first role as an Operational Psychologist at the end of a runway in Farnborough. She was also awarded a PhD degree for her research into military suicide.

Suzy left government to pursue a portfolio career and has sat on many boards of national and international organisations. She has also retained a strong commitment to government serving on many committees including the State Honours Committee (Cabinet Office), the Science Advisory Council (Defra) and the Ethics Group of the National DNA Database (Home Office).

Currently, for government, she sits on the national Independent Reconfiguration Panel which advises on large scale change in the NHS and for the Ministry of Justice she hears disciplinary cases involving judges. She is also a member of the Social Security Advisory committee which works with DWP and HMRC on social security and related matters.

Suzy describes her greatest achievement as being the proud mother of 7 – the youngest arriving during the Covid pandemic. For many years Suzy was a widow. Her experience of combining a full-time career in many different industries with bringing up a large family makes her a powerful keynote speaker.