Baroness Anne Longfield
Baroness Longfield has spent the last four decades at the forefront of influencing and shaping the national debate and policy agenda to boost the life chances of children, particularly the most vulnerable.
In 2024, Anne founded and became chair of the Centre for Young Lives. Prior to this Anne established and chaired the Commission on Young Lives, an independent commission to develop a new national plan to support and protect vulnerable teenagers from harm and exploitation, and to support them to succeed.
Between 2015 and 2021, Anne was Children’s Commissioner for England championing the rights and interests of children and young people by acting as children’s ‘eyes and ears’ in the corridors of power in Whitehall and Westminster. In this role, she was a prominent and passionate advocate for children during the Covid pandemic.
Anne previously led a national children’s charity delivering a nationwide network of children’s centres, and she also worked on the development of the Sure Start programme in the No. 10 Strategy Unit under Prime Minister Tony Blair. She spent many years campaigning for better childcare at a time when many saw these issues as obscure or niche.
Anne was appointed as the Chair of the Independent Statutory Inquiry into Grooming Gangs in December 2025.
Haroon Chowdry
Haroon Chowdry is Chief Executive of the Centre for Young Lives and a strong advocate for children and young people. Throughout his career, he has used research and insights to drive policy change for children, families, and people facing social disadvantage. He joined from GambleAware where he was Director of Evidence & Insights, overseeing its work on inequalities and children and young people. Before this, he was Director of Evidence at the Children's Commissioner's Office, where he led its work on childhood vulnerability and oversaw all of its research and data-gathering. He also worked at the Early Intervention Foundation (now Foundations), where he developed approaches for assessing the costs and benefits of early intervention, as well as the costs of late intervention. He began his career at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, where he researched education policy and early intervention.
Research website: https://www.centreforyounglives.org.uk/
Professor Marianne van den Bree
Marianne is Professor of Psychological Medicine within the Division of Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences, the Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics and the Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute at Cardiff University.
Her research focuses on the characterisation of the genetic and environmental factors that play a role in the development of mental health disorders. This includes understanding the complex developmental relationships across the lifespan between mental health disorders and other health-related conditions.
Marianne leads the LIfespaN multimorbidity research Collaborative (LINC) programme, which brings together researchers from seven research institutions in the UK and Denmark. LINC studies the development of multiple long-term chronic conditions of body and mind across the lifespan and involves analysis of nine large longitudinal cohorts (combined sample size ~10 million) to evaluate the role of genetic and environmental factors on risk of development of these co-occurring conditions.
She is also a Principal Collaborator in the Born in Bradford Age of Wonder Programme.
Marianne’s background is in psychology, human genetics, and epidemiology/methodology. She has extensive experience playing lead roles in international consortia studying mental health and genetics, and is passionate about communicating research findings widely and achieving societal benefit.
Professor Colette Fagan
Professor Colette Fagan, FAcSS, is The University of Manchester’s Vice-President for Research, responsible for leading the University’s research and international strategies.
Previously, Colette was the Deputy Dean and Vice-Dean for Research for the Faculty of Humanities and served concurrently as a Senate-elected representative on the University’s Board of Governors. She is an appointed member of UKRI’s Research England Council, chairs the Research England Advisory Group (REAG) for the School of Advanced Study (SAS), University of London, and serves on the UUK PVC Research and Innovation Group.
Colette is an elected Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences in recognition of her research and policy impact focused on working conditions and job quality, gender relations and inequalities, working-time and time-use, and international comparative analysis.
She has held visiting academic appointments at universities and research institutes in Australia, Germany, and the USA. Her research has been supported by major national and international funders, including the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the European Union’s research framework programmes.