Helen Gentle

Ben Coates – a keen climber, runner and outdoors enthusiast based on Cardiff – is a Civil Servant who has worked across Whitehall in a range of roles including Chief of Staff at the Equality and Human Rights Commission and, currently, Joint Head of Strategy at HM Courts and Tribunals. But it was as Head of Scholarships at the UK Foreign Office, where he led the Chevening and Marshall programmes, that he became passionate about international education and learning exchange. He is also a criminal law magistrate, a Non-Executive Director on the Board of Plas y Brenin, the National Outdoors Centre in North Wales – and will shortly stand down as a Trustee for Diverse Cymru, a Welsh equalities charity, after 4 years. He is a qualified Executive Coach and a mentor with the Social Mobility Foundation.

Professor Rudolf K. Allemann is a Distinguished Research Professor, Pro Vice-Chancellor International and Student Recruitment and Head of the College of Physical Sciences and Engineering at Cardiff University.
He received his first degree from ETH Zurich, followed by PhD work at Harvard University and ETH Zurich, and began his career as a postdoctoral researcher and Staff Scientist at the Medical Research Council’s National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill, London. He later became Research Group Leader and Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at ETH Zurich.
In 1998 Professor Allemann moved to the University of Birmingham to become a Senior Lecturer in Chemistry, before taking up the role of Professor of Chemical Biology in 2001. He joined Cardiff University in 2005 as a Distinguished Research Professor and became Head of the School of Chemistry in 2013.
In 2017 he was appointed Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head of the College of Physical Sciences and Engineering. In 2019 he became Chair of the Recruitment and Admissions Strategy Group and in 2020 assumed overall responsibility for the University’s global engagement activities.
He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and the Royal Society of Chemistry, and currently holds a Visiting Professorship at the University of Manchester.
Professor Allemann’s pioneering research is at the interface of chemistry and biology and he has a long-standing interest in understanding the fundamental mechanisms that control enzyme function.
His research group at Cardiff University apply a wide range of chemical and physical techniques to answer questions relating to the extraordinary catalytic power of enzymes, developing and applying chemical tools to probe and control biological processes in the laboratory and in live cells. Their work relies on an interdisciplinary approach at the interface of chemistry and fields such as biology, chemical ecology, material science, medicine and physics.

Director of Communications, Marketing and Student Recruitment.