Commanders of the Order of the British Empire
Christopher Badger, from Cambridge, has been made a CBE for services to adult social care. He is executive director of adult care services at Hertfordshire County Council.
Mr Badger is responsible for adult social care in Hertfordshire, including support for older people, people with a learning disability and people with a physical disability. He has worked in various roles across health and social care in Hertfordshire, both within the council and the NHS.
Curator, numismatist and chair of the Treasure Valuation Committee, Dr Roger Farrant Bland OBE has been awarded a CBE for services to heritage.
At the British Museum, Dr Bland was a curator in the Department of Coins and Medals from 1979 before he was seconded to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport from 1994 to 2003.
He served as head of the Department of Portable Antiquities and Treasure from 2005 to 2013 and keeper of the Department of Prehistory and Europe from 2012 (renamed the Department of Britain, Europe and Prehistory from 2014) until his retirement from the British Museum in 2015.
Since 2015, Dr Bland has been a visiting professor at the University of Leicester and a senior fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. He was awarded an OBE for services to heritage in 2008.
Baroness Poppy Gustafsson, 42, co-founder of tech security giant Darktrace, has been made a CBE for services to the cyber security industry.
Baroness Gustafsson was named a minister for investment at the Treasury in October as part of Keir Starmer’s new government.
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
Prof Gilly Carr is professor of conflict archaeology and holocaust heritage and has been awarded an OBE for services to holocaust research and education.
Prof Carr, a fellow of St Catharine’s College, is a member of both the UK delegation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and the academic advisory board for the UK Holocaust Memorial Centre. Professor Carr has a particular research interest in wartime incarceration, internment and imprisonment. Her latest book, A Materiality of Internment, which drew on more than 15 years of research and interviews with more than 65 former internees, was published this year.
She said: “I am absolutely thrilled for my research and teaching to be recognised in this way. I’ve been working hard on behalf of victims of Nazism and the Holocaust for 15 years and for this to be seen as nationally important and worthwhile encourages me to continue my work with vigour.”
Prof Rachel Oliver, who also receives an OBE, is a materials engineer, inventor and commercial spinout founder. A fellow of the University of Cambridge’s Robinson College, she is currently director of the Cambridge Centre for Gallium Nitride and chief scientific officer of Poro Technologies Ltd (Porotech).
Her research is in understanding and engineering the small-scale structure of semiconductor materials to enable new technologies to develop. Prof Oliver is a fellow of the Royal Society of Engineering and is a passionate advocate for equality, diversity and inclusion in science and engineering.
She said: “I am delighted to receive this honour and it is vital that I acknowledge the fabulous teams that I work with both in the University of Cambridge and at Porotech, a company that spun out from my research group. I hope I can encourage more people to get involved in semiconductors in the UK. The semiconductor ecosystem has been an exciting place to work throughout my career, but never more so than right now, with both research and industry rapidly growing and stepping up to address some of the most pressing challenges we face.”
Prof Shahina Pardhan has been awarded an OBE for services to optometry and preventing blindness. Prof Pardhan is the founding director of the Vision and Eye Research Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. She was appointed as the first female Professor of Optometry in the UK in 2001.
Under Prof Pardhan’s strategic leadership, supporting a multinational and multidisciplinary team of researchers in clinical and public health research, the institute has received world-leading status through its publications and impact.