The Museum Advisory Group are a group of professional people from a diverse range of backgrounds, each with a specific expertise in the development and management of museums. The group meets three times a year to look strategically at all aspects of the Museum and to give advice & guidance based on their own experience. The group is made up from people with backgrounds in conservation, digital communications, fundraising, decolonisation, digital collections and media.
The members of the group are:
Dame Sandra Dawson (Group Chair)
Dame Sandra June Noble Dawson, DBE, FAcSS is a British social scientist and academic. She was Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge from 1999 to 2009, making her the first woman to be master of a formerly all male College at the University of Cambridge.
Professor Mark Brown
Professor Mark Brown is the Director of the University of Cambridge Museum of Zoology.
Mark did his undergraduate degree in Zoology at the University of Oxford, before doing his PhD on the behavioural ecology of seed-eating ants at Stanford University (USA). After post-doctoral fellowships at ETH-Zürich, where his research focus switched to the evolutionary ecology of host-parasite interactions and insect conservation biology, he held academic positions at Trinity College Dublin (2002-2008) and Royal Holloway University of London (2008-2026) . He has been a Professor in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, and Director of the University of Cambridge Museum of Zoology since January 2026
Jonathan Drori CBE
Jon is an author and Trustee of The Eden Project, Raspberry Pi and Cambridge Science Centre. He is on the board of Cambridge University Botanic Garden and is Honorary Professor of Science Communication at Birmingham University’s Institute of Forest research. Previously he was a Trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Executive Producer of more than fifty popular BBC TV series on science and technology. His books, Around the World in 80 Trees and Around the World in 80 Plants, are bestsellers in many languages.
Professor Shreepali Patel
Shreepali is a filmmaker, writer, founder of StoryLab, interdisciplinary research institute and BAFTA & Emmy winning Eyeline Films. A former BBC producer & director, her work has a strong focus on the convergence of storytelling, human creativity and technology. and works across platforms and emerging media. She provides story consultancy and the development of new strategies and creative intervention to support the preservation of identity, culture and heritage and to surface diverse voices through powerful narrative driven experiences.
Miranda Stearn
An arts and heritage professional with 20+ year’s experience working in the UK sector, Miranda is equally at home in the spheres of museums, contemporary arts, and heritage, with particular experience in cultural learning and university museums. As Deputy Director and Head of Programmes at Wordsworth Grasmere, part of the Cumbria Museums Consortium, Miranda works to deliver a vision of a future in which the lives and works of William and Dorothy Wordsworth inspire an inclusive, creative and sustainable world. Her previous experience includes arts and heritage development within a sector-leading local authority arts service, a learning-focussed policy role for a UK-wide funder, Head of Learning at The Fitzwilliam Museum, Curator at Lancaster Arts and Head of Programme and Partnerships at Liverpool Biennial. She completed a PhD in Art History at The Courtauld Institute of Art exploring contemporary art interventions in museums, and was Clore Duffield Cultural Learning Fellow in the Clore Leadership Fellowship 2024.
Visit Dove Cottage & Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere
Jack Ashby
As the Assistant Director of the University Museum of Zoology, alongside the Director, Jack has a strategic and operational overview of the Museum's varied activities - developing the Museum as both a valuable academic resource and an excellent public venue, while caring for our collections responsibly. A key area of interest is the ways that the natural world is represented to the public, particularly through museums, and understanding how those representations can be biased in various ways. Jack's zoological focus is on the mammals of Australia, including their ecology and colonial histories.
Len Dunne
Chief Executive Office of Fitzwilliam Museum Enterprises
Dr Sarah Joomun
Dr Sarah Joomun is the Digital Collections Manager at the University Of Oxford Museum of Natural History.
Sarah has worked at the Museum in Oxford since 2010 on a wide range of collections digitisation projects, from 3D digitisation of fossils, to scanning and cataloguing archival material. She introduced an integrated collections management system at the museum and has been involved in several stages of development of the online collections' search functions. She has just completed a project to amalgamate and migrate the Museum's collections data to the Axiell EMu collections management system.
Sarah has an BSc in Geology and Geophysics from the University of Durham, an MSc in Palaeobiology from the University of Bristol and a PhD on fossil mammal tooth microwear and diet from Royal Holloway University of London and the Natural History Museum in London, during which she carried out digital imaging and collections-based research in European museums.
Brian Eversham
Brain Eversham is the Chief Executive Officer of The Wildlife Trust for Beds, Cambs & Northants.
Miranda Lowe
Miranda Lowe is a Principal Curator and museum scientist at the Natural History Museum, London. With over two decades worth of collections management and curatorial skills she cares for a plethora of historically important specimens from both the Challenger and discovery oceanic expeditions.
Her scientific expertise is in peracarid crustacea and a with a light touch in coral taxonomy. With that she manages directly both the crustacea and Cnidaria and assciated minor phyla collections.
As well as her management of a curatorial team she also presents lectures on both curatorial research and popular science: Miranda has appeared in the BBC Radio 4 series ‘Natural Histories’ in an episode on Sea Anemones (2015), BBC Four – Britain’s Whale Hunters: The Untold Story (2014) and CBBC Absolute Genius with Dick and Dom: Darwin episode (2013). After a yearlong secondment in 2006 to learn about exhibitions and gallery interpretation in a museum environment she has been passionate ever since about the role that museum exhibitions play in our understanding of the natural world.
Simon Fairclough
Simon Fairclough is the inaugural Director of the University of Cambridge's Centre for Music Performance, where he leads the University's extracurricular music programme, and a Fellow and Trustee of Girton College. He previously held senior leadership positions at the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Academy of Ancient Music and worked as an opera agent. He brings experience of fundraising, governance and public engagement in the higher education and cultural sectors.
