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Alec Pearson is using the skills he has gained from a career in both industry and academia to grow a business that helps companies and educational institutions develop employability and leadership skills.

Glasgow-based Alec, who was at QE from 1986 to 1990, established his company, Pearson Communication, in 2012. Today it helps young people through two programmes: The Employability Skills Programme, which Alec developed himself, and the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) Level 2 Award and Extended Award for Young Leaders.

He has happy memories of his time at QE under Headmasters Eamonn Harris and Dr John Marincowitz, when he belonged to Harrisons’ House.

After leaving School, Alec gained a number of qualifications, initially in business information, followed by a Level 5 ILM Certificate in Leadership in 2008. He worked in the world of Information Technology for more than 18 years across sectors including manufacturing and law in both London and Edinburgh.

“Following five years as a senior manager, I reviewed my career to date and came to the conclusion that to progress it further, I should study full-time for a MBA,” he explains. He duly graduated with an MBA in December 2011 from the University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Business School.

“While still working as a senior manager, I found that my passion was in teaching and developing staff,” he said. Armed with his MBA, he therefore developed and launched Pearson Communication, while also continuing to lecture for Glasgow University. The company was an ILM Approved Provider from 2012 until January this year, when it became an ILM Approved Centre.

In his teaching, Alec, a Fellow of the Institute of Leadership & Management (ILM) and Chartered Management Institute (CMI), adopts a motivational, passionate approach and facilitates group discussion and group exercises. He believes that learning must be “inspiring, fun and engaging”.

His work includes teaching postgraduate students in management, strategy, human resource management (HRM) and international HRM and operations management. He also provides dissertation supervision.

In October 2013, the Independent newspaper published an article Alec had written, in which he advised business leaders on how to deal with the uncertainty caused by the looming Scottish independence referendum. During this period, he was also a Global Ambassador for the Association of MBAs.

“In my spare time, I like to pursue my interest in travel, both within the UK and abroad.  I am very interested in learning about, and embracing, different cultures, particularly Asian cultures,” he says.

Alison Mihail, daughter of notable Old Elizabethan Ronald Orton and herself an ardent supporter of the School, was awarded an MBE in the New Year’s Honours List.

Alison, who has since received the MBE from the Prince of Wales in an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace, was recognised for a long record of outstanding service to young people. This includes raising more than £1.4m for The Prince’s Trust over the past 18 years.

The Orton family have been benefactors of the School for many years: among the Endowed Prizes and Special Awards at the annual Senior Awards ceremony is The Ronald E. Orton Memorial Prize for Commitment and Service. Ronald Ernest Orton was at the School from 1919 to 1926, when it was still based in the Wood Street building. He was Clerk to the Trustees until 1991, and in the 1970s was the President of the OE Association.

Alison gave details of her father’s career: “He was an accountant and then Company Secretary for Gaumont British Picture Company, before I think it was taken over by Rank. Latterly, in retirement, he was Clerk to St Stephens Parish Council in St Albans.”

Headmaster Neil Enright said: “Our congratulations go to Alison on the MBE and we are delighted to be able to celebrate her success here: she is, in fact, the first woman to feature in Alumni News. Alison is very much a ‘friend of the School’ and has told me that she feels very close to QE.”

Alison was an honoured guest at this term’s Senior Awards Ceremony. She also attended the dedication ceremony for the permanent poppy memorial to the School’s war dead in November and attended the OE Association Dinner on the same evening. This was in her capacity as an executor for the late Dennis Nelms (OE 1934–41) and his wife, Muriel, whose bequest enabled the purchase of the ceramic poppies from the Tower of London display.

Since retiring as the deputy headteacher of The Grange School in Aylesbury, she has volunteered on various Prince’s Trust committees, councils and action groups. Over the past 20 years, Alison, who lives in the Berkshire village of Finchampstead, has turned her hand to everything from managing renovation projects in Romania to setting up 26 of the Trust’s XL Clubs in secondary schools across Berkshire. These help 13-19 year-olds to develop skills and confidence.

Her fund-raising for the Trust was conducted through her role as Chair of the Thames Valley Area Development Committee and she has also mentored 43 corporate teams who took part in the charity’s annual entrepreneurial fundraising challenge, Million Makers.

Writing to the Headmaster, she reflected on her MBE and the ceremony at the Palace. “It has all been hugely exciting and also very humbling. I met some inspiring recipients during the morning investiture. There are so many good people in this country.”

Artificial intelligence expert, neuroscientist and computer game designer & player Demis Hassabis is almost certainly the most financially successful Elizabethan.

Demis sold the start-up technology company he co-founded to Google for a reported £400 million in January 2014.

Demis is still involved with the company – DeepMind – which hit the headlines in spring 2016 when its AlphaGo program beat one of the highest-ranking players in the world in the ancient board game of Go. The program won four games in a five-game series.

While he was at QE from 1988–1990, Demis was already a chess prodigy, reaching master standard at the age of 13, with a rating that made him the second-highest rated U14 player in the world. He captained many of the England junior chess teams.

He later went on to Christ's College in Finchley, where he took his A-levels aged 16 and then began his computer games career with the British company, Bullfrog Productions. At 17, he was co-designing and lead-programming on the classic game, Theme Park.

He left Bullfrog to read for the Computer Science Tripos at Queens' College, Cambridge, taking a double first. Later in his career, he gained a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from University College London and continued his research in neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at UCL and as a visiting scientist jointly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard.

Following his graduation from Cambridge, he worked as a lead AI programmer on the Lionhead Studios title Black & White. He then founded Elixir Studios in 1998, a London-based independent games developer. He expanded the company to 60 people, signing publishing deals with Eidos Interactive, Vivendi Universal and Microsoft, and was the executive designer of the BAFTA-nominated Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius games.

As well as designing games, Demis was also an expert player, winning the Pentamind world games championship a record five times before retiring from competitive play in 2003. He is an expert player of games including chess, the Diplomacy board game and shogi board games and poker. The Mind Sports Olympiad website describes him as probably the best games player in history.

In April 2005, his company's intellectual property and technology rights were sold to various publishers and the studio was closed. Demis left the games industry and turned his attention to neuroscience, winning wide acclaim from experts in the field for his research into memory and amnesia. His work was listed as in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2007 by Science magazine.

In 2010, he co-founded and became Chief Executive Officer of London-based DeepMind Technologies, a company working on machine learning, which is a branch of computer science. DeepMind specialises in building ‘general algorithms’ – algorithms that are capable of learning for themselves directly from raw experience or data and are general in that they can perform well across a wide variety of tasks straight 'out of the box'.

Following Google's acquisition of DeepMind, he is now Vice President of Engineering, leading the company’s general AI projects. Google DeepMind’s website proclaims that its aim is to ‘Solve intelligence: use it to make the world a better place.”

Interviewed by the Evening Standard shortly after the deal, Demis said he had no plans to leave London, where he enjoyed living with his wife – a molecular biologist – and two young sons. “I think we punch above our weight,” he told the reporter. "We have some of the world's best universities producing all these amazingly smart people, scientists and programmers who want to work in technology that might change the world. There are not as many opportunities in the UK as in San Francisco, so if you're that kind of company and you base yourself here you have a lot more available talent of the highest calibre that is looking for something more interesting than going into finance or down the usual routes in London."

Demis was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) in 2009 for his game design work. He was awarded the prestigious Mullard Award by the Royal Society in 2014. He was included in the 2013 Smart 50 list by Wired, listed as the third most influential Londoner in 2014 by the Evening Standard and in the Financial Times' top 50 entrepreneurs in Europe.

Johan Byran is forging a successful career as a GP – and achieving remarkable feats in marathon-running as he battles his rheumatoid arthritis.

Johan (1997–2004) studied Medicine at University College London and now practices as a GP in Enfield. He also works in palliative medicine at St Francis Hospice near Romford in Essex.

His JustGiving page explains the connection between his rheumatoid arthritis – an autoimmune disease that causes inflammation in the joints – and long-distance running: “I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 18, just weeks before I was due to go to Medical School. At 18 years old, most people probably thought they were invincible and, sure enough, so did I. However, in a matter of weeks, I was dependent on my brother to care for me in university halls. It was hardly the life of Med School I had imagined. I was destroyed physically and felt powerless to change my circumstances.

"My turning point was running my first marathon in 2008 – the Flora London Marathon. The significance of completing the race was that at one point I would struggle to walk 200 yards down the street to get to my lectures – so the idea of running 26.2 miles was my challenge to not allow this disease to dominate my life. What I took away from that day was that I was able to overcome my physical adversity through a great support network and determination."

In the following years, he has completed multiple marathons as well as an Ironman triathlon and the London2Brighton 100km run. In 2015, he ran 12 marathons in 12 months to raise money for Arthritis Research UK.

Johan continues to run – he has his sights set on the famous Marathon des Sables in the Sahara desert, which is billed as the ‘toughest footrace on earth’. Run over six days, it is more than 150 miles long and the event’s website spells out to potential competitors what they can expect: “Conditions: Stating the obvious – it will be hot. Very hot. Midday temperatures in the Sahara can get up to 120 Fahrenheit. So you will need something on your head. But your feet are just as important, if not more so. You will be running or walking on uneven, rocky or stony ground, with up to 20 per cent of the distance in sand dunes.”

In preparation, Johan has been training in a special laboratory-type environment which emulates the desert’s heat. His friend and QE contemporary, Jonathan Ho, who is a filmmaker, is shooting a documentary about him, interviewing him in various locations – in a classroom at QE, where the photo above was taken, and also at University College London, his old university, and in Morocco.

After a varied early career, Dr Robert Aldridge is establishing a national reputation for his research in the sphere of public health.

Robert (OE 1988–1995) has been a management consultant in the City, a hospital doctor and is now a medical academic.

On leaving QE, he went to Nottingham, where he gained an MEng degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1999. He then spent some time in management consultancy, before a volunteering trip to India inspired him to make a career change.

“After my engineering degree, I took a year out to volunteer in India and, whilst there, I worked with several doctors in very poor areas of the country, delivering services and education to women and working children,” Robert said. “It was during this time that I realised that medicine was actually what I wanted to do.”

He returned to England to take up an existing job offer from Accenture and worked for a period in the investment banking industry, but eventually decided that he needed to follow his true vocation.

He duly went to University College London, gaining his degree in Medicine in 2007. He was then appointed a junior doctor at the Royal Free Hospital and at Barnet and Chase Farm. He subsequently trained as a Public Health doctor in Bromley Primary Care Trust, Bromley Local Authority and Public Health England.

Robert is now an Academic Clinical Lecturer at the Institute of Health Informatics, University College London, and also works in the Data Science team at Public Health England.

Research has been a key interest, and he has written numerous scientific articles in peer-reviewed publications and various policy documents for the Government, including chapters of the Chief Medical Officer’s annual report. In 2010, he gained an MSc in Epidemiology at The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“I’m interested in public engagement with scientific research and conducted a project in which I worked with schools across England to see whether schools absence data can be used to detect levels of influenza in the community,” he says.

“My current and future research focuses on infectious disease epidemiology and the health inequalities faced by vulnerable, and often invisible populations such as homeless, migrants, prisoners and intravenous drug-users.

In 2016, he won a national medical prize – the 2016 Lancet Young Investigator award – for his research into tuberculosis among vulnerable people. He gained the award after presenting work from his PhD on Screening of tuberculosis in migrants before entry to the UK: a population-based cohort study. The award, which he won jointly with Dr Vanessa Wong of the Cambridge Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, included a £2,500 prize and the opportunity to write an editorial for The Lancet on the wider implications of his research. Robert describes the award as a “great honour”.

He spends most of his spare time with his young daughter, Hazel, “who keeps me grounded”, he says.