John Chisholm

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Sir John Chisholm, FREng (born August 1946) is the Executive Chairman and former Chief Executive of QinetiQ and chairman of the Medical Research Council.

He attended Cambridge University on a scholarship from General Motors. After completing his studies, he worked at GM, and later at BP's computer-consultancy firm Scicon before forming a software company called CAP Scientific Ltd in 1979. CAP was sold in 1988 to Sema, a French company.

In 1991, Chisholm was asked by the UK Ministry of Defence to organize a number of their research organisations into a single entity, which eventually became the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA). In July 2001, three quarters of DERA was spun off to form a new private company called QinetiQ. In late 2005 Chisholm became Executive Chairman of QinetiQ, being replaced as CEO by Graham Love. According to The Sunday Times his annual pay was £467,000 in 2004. His £129,000 investment in the company was later worth £23m (a 17,829.5% return on his investment, almost 180 times the initial value of the investment suggesting the company was undervalued and the taxpayer was ripped off).^[1]

Chisholm was a founding member of the British Government's Technology Foresight programme, and has been President of the Electrical Engineering Association. He was President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (2005-2006) and President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (2006). He was knighted in 1999.

Appointed chairman of the Medical Research Council in 2006, in 2007 the House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology said "we have serious reservations as to whether Sir John is the right person to guide the MRC Executive through the coming period of change".