Meet the Trustees
Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch
Anji is currently a Senior Adviser for Edelman, providing senior counsel to clients across the business advising on corporate reputation building, crisis management and public affairs. She is also working with the agency to help promote senior women in the communications industry. Prior to joining Edelman, she worked for the Royal Academy of Engineering as the Director of The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and before that was Group Head of Government and Social Affairs at Anglo American plc, and for seven years she was Group Director of Communications at BP. She worked for Prime Minister Tony Blair from 1987 to 2002, in opposition and government, becoming Head of Government Relations in Downing St (1997), where she was a key liaison with the Cabinet, Civil Service, the Labour Party, Opposition Leaders, other Governments, and key media, business, and NGO figures. She was raised to the Peerage as Baroness Hunter of Auchenreoch in 2025 and sits on the Labour benches.
Michael Lynas
Michael is UK and Europe Director at Duolingo, where he works with universities and governments, focusing on language learning and the Duolingo English Test. He founded and led National Citizen Service Trust (NCS), supporting more than 600,000 students to build the skills they need for the future. Prior to NCS, Michael worked as a senior advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron at No 10 Downing Street from 2010-2013 and before that as a strategy consultant at Bain & Company. Michael is passionate about helping young people realise their potential and serves as a Trustee for City Year UK. He has an MA in Politics from Trinity College, Cambridge where he was President of the Union, and a Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Dame Antonia Romeo DCB
Dame Antonia was appointed as the Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service on 19 February 2026. Antonia has previously served as Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Permanent Secretary of the Department for International Trade, and Her Majesty’s Consul General in New York and Director General Economic and Commercial Affairs USA, and Special Envoy to the US technology companies, based in New York. She joined the Civil Service in 2000 as a professional economist following an early career in the private sector at strategic consultancy firm Oliver Wyman. Antonia sits on the Civil Service Board, is Chair of the Senior Leadership Committee of the Civil Service and is the Civil Service Gender Champion. She holds an MA (PPE) from Oxford University, an MSc (Economics) from the London School of Economics, and an Advanced Management Programme diploma from Columbia Business School. She was awarded a DCB in 2024 for public service.
Chris Farmer
Chris helps run his family office, whose primary focus is on investing and supporting early and mid-stage technology companies based in Europe and North America. As part of this role, he acts as an advisor to many of the companies which are supported by the family. Chris spent the first seven years of his career as a consultant at Bain & Company, and subsequently held a number of senior roles in technology companies. He holds an MA (PPE) from the University of Oxford, where he was President of the Union. He is also an ambassador for the Sainsbury Centre of Visual Arts and has a passion for vintage cars and British design.
Dame Hayaatun Sillem DBE
Hayaatun is the founder and CEO of Argentic Associates, focussed on transforming major philanthropy, and host of What We Don’t Know, the podcast on better leadership in an uncertain world. Until the end of 2025, she was CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering, which promotes engineering and technology excellence for public benefit, and Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, which awards the world’s most prestigious engineering prize. She is a member of the UK government’s Women in Tech Taskforce, Chair of Mission 44 and NXD at construction company Laing O’Rourke.
She previously cofounded the Academy’s Enterprise Hub, the UK’s top startup hub (FT 2026), chaired the government’s Business Innovation Forum and co-chaired with Sir Lewis Hamilton his Commission on improving Black representation in motorsport. She was awarded a CBE in 2019 and a DBE in 2026 for services to Engineering.
Sarah von Schmidt
Sarah von Schmidt is the lead director of Farrer & Co Trust Corporation in its role as trustee of JBCT. Sarah is a solicitor and partner at Farrer & Co LLP where she leads the firm’s private client group. She specialises in advising a wide range of private clients from entrepreneurs to international families to UK-based owners of landed estates and their collections on succession, trusts and other areas including philanthropy. Sarah has a wide range of interests in the arts and in education. Sarah studied Modern History at Oxford University before commencing her legal training. She is also a member of the UK Board of Trustees of Freelands Foundation, a charity focused on the arts.