The Panmure House Prize Judging Panel

Professor Adam Dixon is responsible for developing and leading academic research at Panmure House on sustainable capitalism, focusing inter alia on the role of the global finance industry, the role of the state, and the role of corporations. Trained as an economic geographer and political economist in the United States, Spain, France, and the United Kingdom, Adam brings an interdisciplinary perspective to this work.

Previously, Adam worked at the University of Bristol and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, where he led a large European Research Council project on sovereign wealth funds.

He holds a D.Phil. in economic geography from the University of Oxford, a Diplôme (Master) de l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris, and a BA in international affairs and Spanish literature from The George Washington University in Washington, DC.

John Kay is an economist whose career has spanned the academic world, business and finance, and public affairs. He has held chairs at the London Business School, the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and is a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, where he began his academic career in 1970.  He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

John is a director of several public companies and a contributing editor of the Financial Times.  He chaired the Review of UK Equity Markets and Long-Term Decision-Making which reported to the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills in July 2012.  He is the author of many books, including The Truth about Markets (2003), The Long and the Short of It (2009, new revised edition 2016) and Obliquity (2010).  Other People’s Money was published by Profile Books and (in North America) by PublicAffairs in September 2015, was a book of the year for Bloomberg, The Economist and the Financial Times, winner of the Saltire Literary Prize for non-fiction, and was short-listed for the Orwell Prize for political writing. Radical Uncertainty, jointly written with Mervyn King, was published in March 2020. His latest book, Greed is Dead, co-authored with Paul Collier, was published in July 2020.

Professor Dame Heather J. McGregor DBE FRSE is the Provost and Vice Principal of Heriot-Watt University Dubai. Professor McGregor was previously the Executive Dean of the Edinburgh Business School, having held the post since 2016. Her earlier career was in investment banking, and she has spent 17 years as an entrepreneur leading her own executive search firm prior to her move into higher education.

Professor McGregor has a PhD from the University of Hong Kong in Structured Finance and an MBA from the London Business School. She is a qualified chartered management accountant (CGMA) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Her undergraduate degree was a BSc in Agricultural Economics & Marketing from Newcastle University. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland, and holds an Honorary Degree from the University of East London.

Professor McGregor is an experienced writer and broadcaster, including writing a column for the Financial Times for 17 years. She was the founder of the Taylor Bennett Foundation, which works to promote diversity in the communications industry, and a founding member of the steering committee of the 30% Club, which works to raise the representation of women at senior levels within publicly listed companies. Professor McGregor has served, and continues to serve, on the board of public listed companies.

In 2021, Professor McGregor was one of the first two people at Heriot-Watt University to be named a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She was awarded a CBE in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours List in UK for her services to business, especially diversity in the workplace. in the 2023 New Year’s Honours List she was made a Dame of the British Empire for services to education and business and heritage in Scotland.

She was among the first to be recognised with the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) by King Charles III.

Hiro Mizuno is a financial executive currently serving as Special Advisor to CEO of MSCI, Inc., Independent Board Member of LiveWire Group Inc. and Mission Committee Member of
Danone S.A.

He was the former Special Envoy of U.N. Secretary-General on Innovative Finance and Sustainable Investment and the former Executive Managing Director, Non-Executive Board Member of Tesla and Chief Investment Officer of the Government Pension Investment Fund of Japan with AUM $1.5trillion.

Prior to joining GPIF, Hiro was a
partner at Coller Capital, a London based private equity firm.

He formerly worked for Sumitomo Trust & Banking Co., Ltd. in Japan, Silicon Valley and New York.

Dr Renosi Mokate is the Executive Chairman of Concentric Alliance (Pty) Ltd. She is the former Executive Dean of the Graduate School of Business Leadership, University of South Africa, and Executive Director of the World Bank Group, representing Angola, Nigeria and South Africa. She has served as Deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank, during which time she also chaired the South African Bank Note Company and the SA Mint Company Her experience at senior executive level spans 20 years.

Dr Mokate has corporate governance experience spanning 25 years serving on public and private sector boards and advisory councils. She has served on the following Board committees: audit and risk, human resources, investment, nominations, corporate governance and social ethics. Dr Mokate is the Chairperson of the Government Employees Pension Fund and of the Pan African Infrastructure Fund. She is a member of the Presidential Economic Advisory Council of South Africa and serves on the Board of Advisors, Joseph R Biden School of Public Policy and Administration, University of Delaware. She has been a board member of the Principles for Responsible Investment Association since 2015.

She holds a PhD (’86) and MA (’83) from the University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware and a BA (’81) from Lincoln University, Pennsylvania. She specialises in Development Economics, Urban Economics and Policy Analysis.

Adrian Orr was appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in March 2018.

Previously, Adrian was Chief Executive Officer at the New Zealand Superannuation Fund. During his time there he won many awards including the Deloitte IPANZ Improving Performance through Leadership Excellence award in 2016, and Asian Investor’s Individual Contribution to Institutional Investment Award in 2017.

Prior to that he was Deputy Governor and Head of Financial Stability for the Reserve Bank. Adrian has also held the positions of Chief Economist at Westpac Banking Corporation, Chief Manager of the Economics Department at the Reserve Bank and Chief Economist at The National Bank of New Zealand. He has also worked at the New Zealand Treasury; and the OECD, based in Paris.

Adrian graduated from the University of Waikato in 1983 with a Bachelor of Social Sciences, majoring in Economics and Geography. He also has a Master of Development Economics from the University of Leicester, England, graduating with distinction in 1985.

David Pitt-Watson is a leading thinker and practitioner in the field of responsible investment.

He was co-founder, and former CEO of Hermes responsible investment activities, which became the largest of any fund manager in the world.

His non-executive activities include chairing the UN Environment Finance Initiative in the run up to the Paris conference. He was a trustee and chaired the endowment fund for NESTA, the innovation charity. He was a non-executive and chaired the Public Interest Committee at KPMG.

Amongst his current activities, he leads the Tomorrow’s Investor programme for the RSA, is advisory Chair of Ownership Capital B.V., and of the Taskforce for Green and Sustainable Finance in Scotland.

He was Pembroke Visiting Professor, and is now a Fellow at Cambridge University, His books have been translated into five languages.

David J. Teece is the Thomas W. Tusher Professor in Global Business and director of the Tusher Initiative for the Management of Intellectual Capital at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. He has authored over 30 books and 200 scholarly papers, and has been cited almost 170,000 times, per Google Scholar. Dr. Teece has been ranked as the world’s most-cited scholar in the combined field of business and management in an analysis of science-wide author citations published in PLOS Biology, a peer-reviewed journal. He is co-editor of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management. Dr. Teece has received nine honorary doctorates and has been recognized by Royal Honors.

Dr. Teece pioneered the dynamic capabilities perspective in strategic management, defined as “the ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competencies to address rapidly changing environments.” According to Science Watch (November/December 2005), his paper (with Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen) “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management” was the most cited paper in economics and business globally.

Dr. Teece co-founded and is executive chairman of the Berkeley Research Group, an expert services and consulting firm of economists and other professionals with expertise in domains ranging from higher education to corporate finance. Founded in 2010, BRG had more than 40 offices and 1,200 employees as of December 2020. Dr. Teece also founded, and then acted as chairman and then vice-chairman of the Law and Economics Consulting Group (LECG), a business that provided expert advice and testimony to companies and countries in need of independent economic analysis and review.

Dr. Teece has a PhD in economics from the University of Pennsylvania and has held teaching and research positions at Stanford University and Oxford University. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand; St. Petersburg State University, Russia (where he was instrumental in founding the Graduate School of Management); Copenhagen Business School, Denmark; Lappeentranta University of Technology, Finland; University of Calgary Haskayne School of Business, Canada; Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania; EBS University of Business and Law, Germany; Edinburgh Business School, United Kingdom; and Keio University, Japan.

Other honours Dr. Teece has received include:

• Thinkers50 Hall of Fame (2020)
• Citation of Excellence, Emerald Publishing (2017)
• Named among Who’s Who Legal’s five “Most Highly Regarded Experts” in North America (2016)
• Distinguished Fellow, New Zealand Association of Economist (2016)
• Eminent Scholar Award, Academy of International Business (2013)
• New Year Royal Honours, Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (2013)
• Herbert Simon Award (2011)
• Winner of the Best Paper Prize Award of the Strategic Management Journal: “Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management” (2003)
• Viipuri International Prize in Strategic (Technology) Management and Business Economics (2003)
• On Accenture’s list of the world’s “Top 50 Business Intellectuals” (2002)

Sarah Keohane Williamson is the Chief Executive Officer of FCLTGlobal. In this role, she leads FCLTGlobal's efforts at conducting innovative, practical research, engaging with our global membership, sharing our perspectives and research with constituents globally, and building our team. Williamson assumed her current role in July 2016, after spending over 21 years at Wellington Management in Boston and San Francisco, most recently as a Partner and Director of Alternative Investments. Prior to joining Wellington Management, Williamson spent over five years with McKinsey & Company Inc. in London, Dallas and Boston. She was also a special assistant at the US Department of State and was a mergers & acquisitions investment banker in New York and London for Goldman, Sachs & Co.

In her FCLTGlobal capacity, Williamson is a co-chair of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Long-term Investing, a member of the Advisory Board for the Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia, and a member of the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary and Financial Research Council of Advisers. Williamson also serves as a Director of Evercore (NYSE:EVR) and is a member of the Harvard Business School Board of Dean’s Advisors, the Boston Children’s Hospital investment committee and the board of
the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

She earned her MBA, with distinction, from Harvard Business School and her BA in Economics, with honors, from Williams College. She holds the Chartered Financial Analyst and the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst designations. She is a US citizen and is married with three grown children.

Mr. Aminu Umar-Sadiq is the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA), with broad experiences in Public Finance Management, Mergers and Acquisitions, Private Equity, and Asset Management.

Prior to his appointment as MD/CEO in October 2022, Mr. Umar-Sadiq served as an Executive Director and Head of Direct Investments (from February 2019) at NSIA. In this role, he was responsible for the investment and portfolio management activities of the Nigeria Infrastructure Fund (NIF), a multi-product, cross-sector domestic infrastructure fund.

He has antecedents at both Morgan Stanley, London and Societe Generale, London, where he worked in Mergers and Acquisitions; and at Denham Capital Management, a natural resources and infrastructure focused Private-Equity fund.

He serves on the following boards in a non-executive capacity; Infrastructure Credit Guarantee Company Limited (InfraCredit), Development Bank of Nigeria (DBN), Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company (NMRC), NSIA Advanced Medical Services Limited (MedServe) and Green Guarantee Company.

Among his current activities, he also serves as a member of the EU High-Level Expert Group on Sustainable Finance for Emerging Economies, contributing his experience to shape sustainable financial strategies in developing markets. Additionally, his role on the Sustainable Investment Advisory Council for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development highlights his dedication to aligning global trade and investment practices with sustainable development goals.

Mr. Umar-Sadiq holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Engineering Sciences from
the University of Oxford.