Jackie Hunter
Ann Jacqueline Hunter, commonly known as Jackie Hunter, is a British scientist and biotech leader. She is a board director of BenevolentAI and a visiting professor at St George's Hospital Medical School and Imperial College London. She chairs the Sainsbury Laboratories at Norwich, the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst, and Brainomix.
Education and early life: Hunter grew up in Gloucestershire and studied at Selwyn School and King’s School, Gloucester. She earned a BSc in Physiology and Psychology from Bedford College, University of London in 1977, and completed a PhD at London Zoo in 1981 on olfaction, aggression and sexual behavior in owl monkeys.
Career: After a Wellcome Trust postdoctoral fellowship at St George’s Hospital, she worked at Glaxo Laboratories on Alzheimer’s disease research, then moved to Astra in 1986 and SmithKline and French (SB) in 1989. Following SB’s merger to form SmithKline Beecham and later GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), she held leadership roles including head of Neurology and GI Centre of Excellence and Site Head at the Harlow site. In 2008 she led GSK’s external innovation strategy and helped develop the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst.
In 2010 she founded OI Pharma Partners, a consultancy promoting open innovation in life sciences. In 2013 she was appointed CEO of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), a position she held until 2016. She also served as a non-executive director of Proximagen and Chiltern International and sat on governing bodies such as Royal Holloway and Bedford College.
In 2016 she joined Stratified Medical, which became BenevolentAI, leading its drug discovery unit. She retired from BenevolentAI in 2020 but remains a board director. In 2019 she became chair of the trustees of the Sainsbury Laboratories, and in 2020 she became chair of the Stevenage Bioscience Catalyst and Brainomix.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:42 (CET).