Advisory board

Board members share their strategic insight with the business school, contributing to our education and research agendas. Members share our values and our commitment to make a real difference to people, practice and society by advancing, supporting and shaping responsible enterprise for a fairer society. Their guidance ensures that we comply with best practice in ethics, responsibility and sustainability.

We work with our advisory board to ensure that our courses remain relevant and up-to-date, and that our graduates have the skill set needed for professional practice, employment or to start their own enterprises.

They also bring opportunities for the school to partner with industry and professional practice on research collaborations, mentoring and work experience for students.

Who's on the board

• Sam Baker
• Sarah Birkbeck
• Rosemary French
• Julia Gallagher
• Tor Hatton

• Matt Knight
• Alan Larkin
• Tanya Petherick
• Adrian Phillips
• Veronica Povey - Chair of the Advisory Board

Sam Baker
Managing Director
OSTC Brighton

Graduating in 2003 from the University of Brighton my first role was a graduate trader for OSTC. I went on to assist in training graduates in the Bromley headquarters before launching OSTC Brighton. OSTC Brighton is one of 14 OSTC group offices worldwide that recruit and develop graduates to trade on the world’s leading exchanges. OSTC Brighton has forged strong links with the university since its opening in 2011, sponsoring the Trading Room at Mithras House and hosting the annual Brighton versus Sussex Trading Challenge.

Sarah Birkbeck
Legal Director
Irwin Mitchell LLP

Sarah is a partner in national law firm Irwin Mitchell LLP, based in its Gatwick office. Sarah has lived and worked in Sussex for twenty years and is passionate about encouraging people from the local community from all walks of life into a fulfilling career in law. Sarah specialises in resolving commercial disputes, particularly those involving intellectual property, breach of confidence, defamation and privacy.

Rosemary French
Non-Executive Guest Editor
Freedom Works and Dynamic Magazine for Women in Business

Rosemary spent 24 years in corporates and SME’s followed by 16 years in not-for-profit economic development and business support. Her retail buying and marketing career included John Menzies and Boots plc, joining the plc board of Ryman, Athena and Dillons Bookstores as Group Marketing Director at only 32. She then became Managing Director of a £20m stationery and card manufacturing company in Oldham with 120 employees. She has led a £13m Management Buyout and two smaller Management Buy In’s as MD and shareholder within venture capital owned small businesses. In the 2000’s Rosemary was CEO of Business Link Surrey where she championed the business support and training needs of women. Between 2006 and 2009 she sat on the Advisory Board of the University of Surrey School of Management. She is currently Executive Director of the Gatwick Diamond Initiative, a business led economic partnership driving economic growth.

Rosemary is also a Governor at East Surrey FE/ HE College, Board Director of Enterprise First and President of Cranleigh Chamber of Commerce. Her OBE, awarded in June 2014, is for services to women in business.

Julia Gallagher
Head of Sales, Marketing & Partnership - VisitBrighton

Working in partnership with over 500 member businesses, VisitBrighton is the city’s official tourism organisation, enticing 12m visitors to the city each year who create £975m of economic impact and support 18,000 FTE jobs.

With over 30 years experience in the visitor economy, working domestically and internationally in B2B and B2C environments, Julia has wide experience of both private and public sector partnership working. In her current role she  is responsible for developing long term strategies to optimise both leisure and business visitor awareness, ensuring that the visitor economy is represented locally, regionally, nationally and internationally, creating long term economic prosperity for Brighton & Hove.

Having studied at Sussex University and now working, living and bringing up a family in Brighton, she is committed to supporting the local community and delivers guest lectures to tourism students across the south-east. She is also a member of the NHS Genomic Medicine Service Project Advisory Team and ARID1B Syndrome Research Group.

Tor Hatton
Lawyer / Founder of Tor’s Law / Career and Mindset Coach

A University of Brighton Law Graduate and now Senior Commercial Dispute Resolution Lawyer. Having spent well over a decade in the Legal industry, (mostly in the City of London), Tor has experience working on small, large and complex matters, for a range of business clients that span the globe.

The Founder of Tor’s Law – a Career and Mindset Coaching Service, helping Lawyers & All, to live life happy and be better than yesterday. Tor welcomes everyone who is ready to move forwards with their career and/or their way of thinking. Working with Junior / Mid-Level / Senior Lawyers, Management, future lawyers, and more; Tor’s Law offers tailored 1:1 Coaching support to a variety of individuals and organisations, in the Legal sector and beyond. 

Passionate about good mental health, social mobility, diversity and inclusion, Tor has also formed a network of lawyers that collaborate to provide talks (to people all over the world), with the purpose of motivating and inspiring – whatever level you’re at.

Matt Knight
Managing Director, Akro Valve

Matt joined Akro Valve in 2017 to take over the leadership role in the company. He has previously worked for British Gas and Shell in operational engineering roles, principally offshore on drilling and production platforms in the North Sea. He also worked in research and development for the Ministry of Defence, where he worked on the various rocket and missile programmes in the UK and US. He holds a BEng. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Hertfordshire and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from University College London. He is a volunteer STEM ambassador and Enterprise Adviser in East Sussex.

Alan Larkin
Head of Innovation & Technology/Director
Family Law Partners

Alan Larkin has worked as a family lawyer for over 20 years. During this time he has achieved accredited expert status with Resolution for family finance work and advocacy in children cases at court as well as training to become an accredited collaborative model lawyer. Nowadays, Alan largely spends his time developing innovative projects within family law. Alan started a blog in 2011 aimed at litigants in person who could not afford legal advice. The requests for assistance generated by the website persuaded Alan that digital self-help tools could be part of the answer. Alan created a child maintenance calculator in 2013 designed to promote transparency and communication between co-parents. It is still widely used today and a second version of that application has been refined as a University of Brighton student final year assessment in 2018.

Alan created and launched a family law triage application called Engage in 2014 and it has been used by nearly 600 clients of Family Law Partners, free of charge, to instruct the firm. The resultant data has been analysed by Alan on the IBM Watson Analytics platform to determine the drivers of cost and case duration for future family law clients. That novel work has been profiled by IBM in a discrete case study.

Alan’s firm has a Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the University of Brighton supported by Innovate UK to apply AI and machine learning to applications in the family law sphere.

Alan has spoken at events hosted by the Law Society and Resolution to stimulate digital working and innovation amongst legal practitioners.

Tanya Petherick
Director
Club Central

Tanya Petherick is a cross-sector business consultant, trainer and mentor who specialises in leadership and management, strategy development and marketing.

Prior to setting up as a consultant, she spent 15 years co-leading a Brighton-based childcare company that employed more than 150 staff in 16 locations.

Adrian Phillips
General Counsel
441 Trust Company Ltd

Adrian Phillips started his career at Simmons & Simmons in the corporate department where he concentrated on mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures and insolvency. In 1995, he joined Visa in London becoming General Counsel and a member of the excom of Visa CEMEA in 1996. He subsequently became Head of Risk and Legal Affairs in 2000. In 2006/7 he, together with his team, was responsible for the merger and IPO of Visa Inc on the New York Stock Exchange. 

Adrian moved to San Francisco in 2007, where he became Deputy Chief Risk Officer and was a member of the excom of Visa Inc. In 2010, Adrian joined Amadeus as Head of Legal IT and Privacy based in Madrid and subsequently Nice. He left Amadeus in the summer of 2014, and was involved in a number of activities including setting up a compliance SaaS company and acting as a special counsel for Jones Day. He is today GC for 441 Trust Company Ltd, a company representing the interests of many banks in Europe in relation to their sale of Visa Europe to Visa Inc. for $20 billion dollars.

Veronica Povey CBE, FCMA - Chair of the Advisory Board

Veronica joined the Advisory Board in October 2018. After graduating with a physics degree from Aston University in Birmingham she specialised in optical engineering, working in the aerospace and defence industry before making a complete career change and joining the fast-stream civil service. She trained as a tax professional in HMRC, joined the senior civil service and became a qualified accountant (FCMA). She went on to hold many Finance Director and leadership roles across Whitehall, become Director of Public Spending at HM Treasury, and more recently she was Finance Director at the Ministry of Defence.

Veronica is a keen supporter of a range of diversity networks and a champion of management excellence, giving her time to mentor and coach people at all stages of their careers. She is passionate about supporting women and under-represented groups to succeed and become influential leaders in the workplace; leading allyship groups, supporting networks and mentoring. She also volunteers widely in her local community and beyond.

Veronica was awarded a CBE in the New Year’s Honours List 2023.