As Senior Vice President (SVP) Service, People & Planning, Professor Evelyn Welch was responsible for leading and coordinating King’s Service, International, National and London activities, ensuring a consistent approach to external engagement that was firmly rooted in our outstanding education and research. With our remarkable community of Academic and Professional Services staff as well our 30,000+ students, King’s is able to make a real difference to some of the world’s complex problems as well as tackling some of our most important local and regional challenges. We can only do this in partnership and this work was supported by teams led by the VP Global Engagement and the VP Communities & National Engagement who, along with the Service and Sustainability teams, Fundraising and Corporate Communications, are key in ensuring that we connect beyond our immediate campus walls.

Professor Welch also led the university's ‘People & Culture’ strategy, bringing oversight to our university-wide work on people, culture, values and inclusivity. She was supported by the Equality, Diversity & Inclusion team and the Dean’s Office in doing so. She also led key parts of King’s planning activities – in particular Estates master-planning – to ensure that the long term development of King’s estate was aligned with our academic ambitions and our service to our wider communities.

Professor Welch was a member of the Principal’s Senior Team, the University Executive and the Senior Leadership Forum.

As Professor of Renaissance Studies, Professor Welch led a range of major research programmes including The Material Renaissance, which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Getty Foundation, Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects, a £5.5 million AHRC strategic research programme which ran from 2005-2012 and is a recent recipient of a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award for a major project on ‘Renaissance Skin’. Professor Welch graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Renaissance History and Literature and received her PhD from the Warburg Institute, University of London. She has taught at the Universities of Essex, Birkbeck, Sussex and Queen Mary, University of London, where she served as Dean of Arts and Vice-Principal for Research and International Affairs before taking on the role of Vice-Principal for Arts & Sciences at King’s College London in 2013. In 2022, Professor Welch joined the University of Bristol as Vice-Chancellor and President and currently serves as the Chair of Trustees of the Dulwich Picture Gallery.