Ed Beale (Honorary Visiting Fellow)

Ed is the Clerk of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee in the House of Commons where he leads a team of policy, research and administrative staff who support the work of the Committee. Ed also performs table duty in the main House of Commons Chamber and in Westminster Hall and acts as the British Clerk to the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly (and Secretary to its Executive Board). He also lectures at a number of universities as part of the House’s Parliamentary Studies programme, delivers seminars on the EU, the role and work of select committees, and the legislative process. He recently authored a chapter on EU legislation of the Exploring Parliament textbook.

Ed’s career in Parliament stretches back 16 years. Prior to his current role he was a Clerk in the House’s Table Office providing procedural advice to members related to House business and had responsibility for the production of the House's daily order paper. During this time he was also the Clerk of the House’s Backbench Business Committee, which allocates time for debates in the Chamber and Westminster Hall.

Anthony Carey (Visiting Professor)

Anthony Carey is Senior Adviser, Board Practice and Public Policy at Mazars in the United Kingdom. Until August 2021, he was a partner and head of UK board practice leading the organisation's board practice. He is also actively involved in the firm's contribution to thought leadership and public policy, especially concerning the future of audit, corporate governance and boardroom developments, corporate reporting, and corporate responsibility. In addition, he plays a leading role in the Centre for Audit Committee and Investor Dialogue, a joint initiative between Mazars and several leading institutional investors.

Anthony is a chartered accountant and director and an experienced reviewer of board effectiveness across various sectors, including banking, insurance, and the public sector. Past appointments include being a member of the FRC Financial Reporting Lab Steering Group and the FRC's Financial Reporting Review Panel. He has also served on the Executive of the Quoted Companies Alliance for several years.

Paul Druckman (Honorary Professor)

Paul Druckman is a Non-Executive Chairman and Director of organisations in multiple sectors. Active in different roles such as Chairman of the Board of the Clear Group and of the World Benchmarking Alliance. Highlights in the past have included being President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales (ICAEW); Chairman of The Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4S) Executive Board; and Board member of the UK government regulator (FRC) whilst also chairing UK accounting standards. He was the founding CEO of the International Integrated Reporting Council.

Khalid Hamid (Honorary Professor)

Khalid is the Director of International for the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA). 

Having started his career as an Assistant Auditor with the UK National Audit Office, Khalid qualified as a CIPFA accountant in 1990 and was promoted several times to the position of Principal Auditor. In his 30 years of public audit experience, he has held senior posts in South Africa and the UAE. Most recently, Khalid was the Executive Director of the UAE State Audit Institution, serving more than 11 years at the audit body, for the majority of that time he served as Chair of the Financial Audit and Accounting Subcommittee of the International Organization of Supreme Audit Institutions (INTOSAI). He is currently serves on the Professional Accountancy Organization Development & Advisory Group of the International Federation of Accountants. 

Noel Hyndman (Honorary Professor)

Since January 2021 Noel Hyndman has been Professor Emeritus at Queen's University Belfast. Noel was Professor of Accounting (2002-2020) and Director of the Centre for Not-for-profit and Public-sector Research (2015-2020) at Queen’s, after previously being Professor of Accounting at the University of Ulster. He has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Ottawa in Canada and the University of Sydney in Australia, as well as being an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and a PARG Visiting Scholar in the Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. His main research interests have centred on performance measurement, performance reporting, management accounting and accounting change in charities, public-sector organisations and not-for-profit organisations. 

Aileen Murphie (Honorary Professor)

Aileen has been a Director of the National Audit Office since 2013. She has published reports to Parliament on the financial sustainability of local authorities, including most recently on Local authority commercial investments. She has also reported regularly on adult social care, most recently focusing on the halting progress on integrating health and social care, and the efforts made by government to ready adult social care for the covid 19 pandemic. She also reports regularly on housing, including Housing in England: an overview; Homelessness; Planning for New Homes; Help to Buy and Starter Homes.

Russell Picot (Honorary Professor)

Russell is Chair of the Trustee board of the HSBC Bank (UK) Pension Fund and a Director of LifeSight, Willis Towers Watson’s UK DC Master Trust Board where he chairs the Audit and Risk Committee. Russell retired as Group Chief Accounting Officer at HSBC in 2016, having joined HSBC in 1993. He was appointed a Group General Manager in 2003.

Russell was a co-chair of the FSB’s Enhanced Disclosure Task Force and is a Special Advisor to the Financial Stability Board’s Climate-related Financial Disclosures Task Force, chaired by Michael Bloomberg. He has supported the HRH The Prince of Wales Accounting for Sustainability project since its inception in 2004 and is an ambassador for the International Integrated Reporting Council.

He is a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership and was recently appointed an Honorary Professor in Durham University Business School. He chairs the IIGCC Investor Practices Programme. 

Russell holds an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge and is a chartered accountant.

Mark Sandford (Honorary Fellow)

Mark is a professional researcher and analyst. In addition to his current role as a subject expert at the House of Commons, he has previously managed academic research (including publishing several articles and two books), and commissioned and undertaken public sector research.

He has in-depth specialist knowledge of local government, parliament and the legislative process.

Chris Swinson (Honorary Visiting Professor)

Chris Swinson OBE has considerable experience and connections in the world of business through his former roles as president of the ICAEW, senior partner of one of the major international accountancy firms, high public offices, and investigative work into major fraud cases including BCCI, Maxwell and Barings.

The current focus of his research is the development of financial regulation in Britain and the US, a topic that has resonance with the work of other staff members in accounting and finance, in particular those researching in the area of historical perspectives in accounting. He is also undertaking research into the life of Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, with a view to writing his biography and has recently completed a biography of Clarence Hatry who contributed significantly to the London stock exchange crash of 1929.

Miklos A Vasarhelyi (Visiting Professor)

Professor Miklos A. Vasarhelyi is the KPMG Distinguished Professor of Accounting Information Systems and serves as Director of the Rutgers Accounting Research Center (RARC) & Continuous Auditing & Reporting Lab (CAR Lab).

He is credited with developing the original continuous audit application and is the leading researcher in this field. At Rutgers Business School, Professor Vasarhelyi heads the Continuous Auditing and Reporting Laboratory, which works on projects for such leading companies as Siemens, KPMG, Procter & Gamble, AICPA, CA Technologies and Brazil’s Itau-Unibanco. Also, he leads the RADAR (Rutgers AICPA Data Analytics Research Initiative) project supported by the 8 leading CPA firms, AICPA, and CPA Canada.

Vasarhelyi, who received his Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from UCLA, has published more than 200 journal articles, 20 books, and directed over 40 Ph.D. theses. He is the editor of the Artificial Intelligence in Accounting and Auditing series and the Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting.

Mike Winter (Honorary Fellow)

Mike is an expert on the UK parliament having spent nearly twenty years working in a variety of roles across the House of Commons and Government in Parliament. Prior to this, he worked in a number of other civil service roles including as a Policy Support Manager for the Royal Committee on the Reform of the House of Lords and as a Private Secretary in the Civil Contingencies Secretariat. At present, Mike is the Clerk of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee. 

Professor Yu Xiong (Visiting Professor)

Prof. Yu Xiong is the Associate Vice-President for External Engagement at the University of Surrey. Previously, he served as the Associate Dean International from 2020 to 2022. Professor Xiong is the founding director of the Surrey Centre for Innovation and Commercialization, where he has secured approximately £2 million to support various activities within the university ecosystem. He is also the founding director of the Surrey Academy for Blockchain and Metaverse Applications, where he has obtained an additional £2 million in funding to support the university's education, training, and research in blockchain business applications. Professor Yu Xiong holds the Chair of Business Analytics at the Surrey Business School and is an academic member of the Department of Business Transformation.