A new President has been appointed at New Hall, which has been refounded as Murray Edwards College.

Dr Jennifer Barnes will take over from Anne Lonsdale who has been President of the College for the past 12 years.

Dr Barnes, who starts on 1 October, will be the fourth president of the College since it was founded in 1954.

She has a long pedigree in higher education in both the public and private sectors, setting up programmes and international collaborations in the sciences, humanities, technology and the arts.

In the 1990s she developed a research partnership between the Royal College of Music, Imperial College and Manchester University to address the effects of performance pressure on musicians and dancers.

In 2005, she was appointed as the first Director of Education for BP. Working across the globe, she advised colleagues in over 25 countries on how to establish partnerships between business, governments and the university sector to support university programmes in the sciences. She continues to advise on governance and organisational culture, in addition to policy and strategy in education.

Dr Barnes is the author of several publications, including The Fall of Opera Commissioned for Television, and her writings have been translated into several languages. She is a contributor to radio and television and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

She originally studied English Literature at Smith College (founded in Massachusetts in the nineteenth century to educate women) and went on to do postgraduate studies in opera at the Royal College of Music.

She gained her doctorate from the University of London before becoming associate professor at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, then Head of Academic Studies and Dean of Trinity College of Music. She is married to the tenor Richard Edgar-Wilson, a Cambridge alumnus, and they have a son and a daughter.

Speaking of her appointment, Dr Barnes said: “I am honoured to contribute to this remarkable College. It was founded by, and for, inspiring women, and is sustained through the commitment of the Fellowship, the College staff and the alumnae, who have given of themselves, professionally and personally, to create an environment of energy and purpose.”

She arrives at an exciting time for the College which recently received a £30million donation from Ros and Steve Edwards, Ros herself an alumna of New Hall. The gift seals the dream of the late Dame Rosemary Murray, the College's founder, to see the College properly endowed and given a permanent name.

In 1954, the College began with one shilling and no name. It was to be known as the 'New Hall', waiting for a donor to appear who would endow and name it. The new name reflects both the philanthropy of the donors and Dame Rosemary's role in founding the College.

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