William Castell

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Person.png William Castell  Rdf-entity.pngRdf-icon.png
(businessman)
William Castell.png
Born10 April 1947)
NationalityUK
Alma materSt. Dunstan's College, Cass Business School
Chairman of the Wellcome Trust 2006-2015

Employment.png Wellcome Trust/Chair

In office
May 2006 - 30 September 2015
Succeeded byEliza Manningham-Buller

Sir William Martin Castell is a British businessman who was chairman of the Wellcome Trust, an endowment second only to the Gates Foundation in its impact on global health, with a £18.5bn endowment and £800m a year to spend on research.


We are on the cusp of spectacular change", he stated in 2015, "Precision medicine means diagnosing the exact cause of ailments in individual patients and then prescribing the best treatment, based on their genetic make-up and environmental circumstances — in contrast to the broad classes of disease recognised and treated today....But it will take a transformation of legacy systems and legacy cultures to make it happen."[1]

He has also been director of General Electric and a former director of BP. He was CEO of Amersham plc from 1989 until it was acquired by GE in April 2004 and then became CEO of GE Healthcare and a vice-chairman of GE.

Castell was educated at St. Dunstan's College and Cass Business School, where he earned a BA. He qualified as an accountant with Spicer and Pegler (1971–75) and then joined Wellcome plc as financial controller of Europe (1976–79), rising to MD Wellcome Biotech (1982–84) and commercial director (1984–89).

He was a non-executive director of The General Electric Company (UK) which became Marconi plc 1997–2002, and was appointed a non-executive director of BP in 2006, until April 2012.

He joined the board of governors of the Wellcome Trust as chairman-designate on 1 January 2006, succeeding Sir Dominic Cadbury as chairman in May 2006. Prior to joining Amersham, he held various positions with the Wellcome pharmaceutical company, which was then owned by the Wellcome Trust.

Alongside his business career he has been involved for many years in other activities, including being a council member of the Medical Research Council (2001–2004) and chairman of the Prince's Trust (1998–2003). He is a former trustee of the Natural History Museum, a board member of the University of Michigan's Institute of Life sciences, a board member of the National Bureau of Asian Research, a Visiting Fellow at Green College, Oxford University, and an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences.


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References


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