Lord David Prior
Independent Non-Executive Chairman
Lord Prior is Deputy Chairman UK and Global Senior Advisor at Lazard.
He was educated at Cambridge University and subsequently qualified as a barrister. He trained in finance at Lehman Brothers and Lazard Freres in New York before holding a number of senior positions within the industrial sector, including British Steel, where he was Commercial Director. He was elected MP for North Norfolk in 1997 and became CEO and Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party.
He served as Chair of Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust from 2002 – 2012 before becoming Chair of the Care Quality Commission. In 2015, he was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Health and created a Life Peer. In December 2016, he was appointed as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, with specific responsibility for developing industrial strategy. He stepped down from this role in October 2017 to become Chair of University College London Hospitals and subsequently became Chair of NHS England, a Director of Genomics England and a member of the UK Life Sciences Council to March 2022.
He is currently Chair of Protas, a not for profit clinical trials business, Chair of the Cambridge Life Sciences Council, Chair of Science Capital Imperial, a venture fund aligned with Imperial College, and a member of the Novo Nordisk Sustainability Advisory Council.