IAS Fellow at Stephenson College, October - December 2026
Dr Claire Diacopoulos Craig is an academic and former civil servant with a lifelong passion for enabling public decision-making to be informed by the best possible evidence. She currently leads the creation of a European Chapter for the International Network for Governmental Scientific Advice, while personally continuing research and practice around the particular challenges of including plural, innovative and novel forms of evidence in public reasoning.
(image courtesy of Fisher Studios)
During her career she worked extensively on strategy and science in decision-making, including periods at McKinsey and in the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit. She worked for three UK Chief Scientific Advisors and, as Director of the UK Government Office for Science, covered policy topics from climate change and genetic engineering to obesity and risk. On leaving the civil service for the second time, she led the Royal Society’s policy programme, served on the UK’s national AI Council and published How does government listen to scientists? (Palgrave) – a rapid account of her experiences in government aimed both at academics and policy-makers. She was co-author of major papers on the creation and use of evidence synthesis (Nature) and on the uses of computational modelling (Royal Society Open Science).
Dr Craig’s leadership of the UK’s innovative science-based strategic futures programme, Foresight, led to the award of a CBE and the chance to work extensively on futures, including at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It also shaped continued engagement with many aspects of anticipation, long term policy-making, extreme risk and deep uncertainty.
Even early on, Dr Craig was interested in how governments need to engage rigorously and practically with forms of evidence and knowledge not routinely included in science advisory systems, such as from the humanities, public participation and lived experience. A shared fascination with the impacts of narrative on public decision-making with respect to then-emerging forms of AI led to a deep collaboration with Sarah Dillon, Professor of English Literature and Public Humanities at Cambridge. The output was Storylistening (Routledge) a major attempt to consider the cognitive and collective impacts of narratives, whether badged as fiction or non-fiction.
As Provost of The Queen’s College Oxford from 2019 to 2025, Dr Craig had the opportunity to live in and reflect on both the significance and the challenges of multi-disciplinary, multi-generational, highly diverse place-based communities for research and learning, some aspects of which were brought sharply into focus when the Covid pandemic began during her first year at Queen’s.
Dr Craig is now an Honorary Fellow of Queen’s and of St John’s College, Cambridge, with an Honorary Degree from the University of Bath. She trained originally as a geophysicist.
While at Durham, Dr Craig hopes to contribute to projects on multi-disciplinary working, public and political engagement, “blind spots”, and communities of practice. She will further develop storylistening in theory and application, including applying it to the exploration of intergenerational futures to support the growing networks of practitioners finding new ways to build InterGenerational Fairness into decision-making around the world.
TBC
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