Co-Opted Committee Members

Co-opted Board Committee members bring specialist knowledge and experience from elsewhere to the work of their Committee, and are also expected to develop a working understanding of the University and its operating context. They work alongside the Chair of the Committee and are full voting members of the Committee with the same decision-making rights and responsibilities as other committee members, but are not members of the Board of Governors and do not have the same individual and collective corporate and charitable obligations as required of the Board of Governors as the body unambiguously and collectively responsible for institutional activities.

Helen Colclough

Employment + Finance Committee- Co-Opted Committee Member

Graeme Hudson

Remuneration Committee - Co-Opted Committee Member

Graeme joined the Remuneration Committee in January 2018.  

Outside of Northumbria University, Graeme is a Director at Baillie Gifford, a global investment management firm.  He oversees the Remuneration, HR Technology, Global Mobility, Employee Experience, and Employment Law and Policy teams.  Graeme was previously Chief of Staff of Salesforce in the UK & Ireland.  He has worked in a range of commercial and HR roles within Financial Services firms.  His HR background includes time within Deloitte's global executive remuneration practice in London.  Until recently he was Chair of JET, a local charity focused on the relief of unemployment specifically for ethnic minority groups in the North East of England.  Graeme graduated MA (Hons) in Management from St Andrews University.  

John Hudson

Audit Committee - Co-Opted Committee Member

Adam Parker

Strategic Performance Committee - Co-Opted Committee Member

Adam is the Chief Performance Officer at Civica, the GovTech business that provides software to over 5,000 public bodies, many of which are in the UK. Civica’s software is used by local and central government, education and health and care bodies to help them serve citizens. In his current role, Adam is accountable for orchestrating and measuring Civica’s performance against its strategic and related transformational objectives. Prior to Civica, Adam held various roles over a five-year period at Sage Group plc, the North-East headquartered FTSE100 accounting, HR and payroll software company. These roles included positions in a variety of functions within the business including finance, product, performance and pricing. His last role was as Sage’s Chief Data Officer, as which he was accountable for ensuring the success of Sage’s data strategy, including championing a data-led culture. 

His first role after university was with PwC, working in audit and corporate finance for over six years, and later in his career subsequently spent another three years working in consulting, with particular focus on public sector procurement. The remainder of his career has been spent founding and running businesses of his own in IT services, digital public relations and social media analytics, all of which he successfully exited.

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and holds a BSc in Economics from the University of Warwick.

Outside work Adam enjoys keeping fit, watching sports, including being a Newcastle United season ticket holder of thirty years, and playing the drums.