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Trustees
Since 31 January 2018, the sole trustee of the Thalidomide Trust has been ‘Thalidomide Trust Company’. The individuals who served as charity Trustees before that date now serve as the directors of the Trustee company. However, we continue to refer them as Trustees internally for continuity and because their role within the Trust remains unchanged.
To fulfil their role effectively, it is important that Trustees understand the needs and lived experience of beneficiaries, so we have introduced a number of different Beneficiary Engagement activities to support this.
Meet our current Trustees
Find out more about the Trustees by clicking on the images to see their bios.
Mark Spofforth OBE
Mark Spofforth OBE
BSC, FCA, CTA, FRSA
Chair of Trustees
Mark is a retired Chartered Accountant, and a former President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants. He has lectured and broadcast on various financial matters including charity finance and governance and served for a period on the Charities SORP Committee. He received the OBE for services to the profession in 2014.
He also chairs the Sussex Community Foundation, having previously been High Sheriff for West Sussex, and is involved in various organisations connected to the Livery Companies in the City of London.
Committees: Finance
Trustee since December 2013, Chair of Trustees from January 2021
David Body
David Body
Vice - Chair of Trustees
Until 30th April 2015, David was National Head of the Product Liability Team at Irwin Mitchell and had specialised in medical negligence and product liability work since the mid 1980s.
His specific areas of medical negligence expertise are claims arising from birth and paediatric injury, anaesthetic and neurosurgical accidents, and he has experience of most types of claims arising from failures to diagnose and treat.
In the 1990s he dealt with many product liability claims arising from the use of contaminated growth hormone which caused Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) and represented the families of CJD victims at the BSE inquiry. He has spent a good part of the last decade running a group action against Sanofi on behalf of the injured children of epileptic women who took sodium valproate during pregnancy.
Committees: Health & Wellbeing
Trustee since January 2015
Shan Abdullah
Shan Abdullah
Finance Trustee
Shan is a pensions actuary with BT, working to improve member and shareholder outcomes in relation to the BT Pension Scheme, one of the UK’s largest corporate defined benefit pension schemes. He specialises in pensions strategy, actuarial & investment risk, and in implementing effective governance & risk frameworks.
Committees: Finance
Trustee since September 2022
Mark Benstead
Mark Benstead
BA, MBA
Finance Trustee
Senior fixed income fund manager at Legal and General Investment Management.
Previous experience at AXA Investment Managers, Royal Bank of Canada and Hambros Bank. Experienced across all classes of fixed income debt with a wide variety of clients.
Committees: Finance
Co-Chair of Beneficiary Insights Panel
Trustee since May 2015
Ruthe Isden
Ruthe Isden
Health & Wellbeing Trustee
Ruthe is the Head of Health and Care Influencing at the Charity Age UK. Her work includes: research and policy development; influencing local and national policy makers; working with professionals and service providers to improve people’s outcomes from and experience of care; and supporting people to maintain and improve their own health and wellbeing. She has extensive expertise in the impact of ageing and older people’s health.
Committees: Health & Wellbeing, Research
Co-Chair of Beneficiary Insights Panel
Trustee since August 2021
Professor Adrian Newland CBE
Professor Adrian Newland CBE
Clinical Trustee
Adrian Newland is Professor of Haematology at Queen Mary University of London and Honorary Consultant at Barts Health NHS Trust.
He is ex-Chair of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) Diagnostic Assessment Programme and co-chairs the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on In-Vitro Diagnostics (SAGE-IVD) and is a member of the peer review group for the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer. Adrian is Specialist Clinical Advisor in Pathology for NHS Improvement. He was President of the Royal College of Pathologists from 2005–2008 and the International Society of Haematology (ISH) from 2014–2016.
Committees: Health & Wellbeing, Finance
Trustee since January 2020
Professor Andrew Owens
Professor Andrew Owens
MD, FRCS(CTh)
Clinical Trustee
Professor Owens is currently a consultant cardiac surgeon at South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust, where he was previously a medical director, R&D director and clinical director.
He was awarded a Hunterian Professorship from the Royal College of Surgeons and currently holds honorary academic appointments with Newcastle, Teesside and Durham Universities.
Committees: Health & Wellbeing, Claims
Trustee since January 2020
Dame Caroline Swift
Dame Caroline Swift
Legal Trustee
From 1978, Caroline practised as a barrister from Chambers in Manchester. She was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1993, specialising in complex clinical negligence, catastrophic brain injury and industrial disease cases, mainly representing claimants. Between 2001 and 2005, she was Leading Counsel to the Shipman Inquiry.
In 2005, she was appointed a Judge of the High Court, Queen’s Bench Division. She tried primarily civil cases and, from 2006 until 2015, she was the Judge in charge of the British Coal Respiratory Disease Litigation, a group action involving over half a million claims. Between 2012 and 2014, she was Judicial College Director of Civil Training, with responsibility for the training in civil work of Judges at all levels in England and Wales.
She retired from the Bench in 2015 and, from January 2017 until December 2022, headed the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service, the body which organises and conducts all disciplinary hearings involving doctors whose fitness to practice the General Medical Council considers may be impaired.
Committees: Claims, Health & Wellbeing
Trustee since January 2023
Professor Rosemary Varley
Professor Rosemary Varley
Research Trustee
Rosemary Varley is Professor in the Faculty of Brain Sciences/Division of Psychology & Language Sciences at University College London. She undertakes research into cognitive impairments following brain injury, particularly in stroke and dementia. She has published research articles in major international journals such as Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of USA, New York Academy of Sciences and Stroke. Her research is funded by government research councils and charities such as the Alzheimer’s Society and the Stroke Association.
Committees: Health & Wellbeing, Research
Trustee since April 2020