Lord Oxburgh was a non-executive director and Chairman of Shell Transport & Trading Company PLC, and Chairman of the Trustees of the Natural History Museum from 2003 to Aug 2005.

He has recently stood down as Chairman of the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology. Ron graduated from the Universities of Oxford and Princeton, and subsequently taught geology and geophysics at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In Cambridge he was Head of the Department of Earth Sciences from 1980-1988 and President of Queens' College from 1984-89.

Lord Oxburgh has spent various periods as Visiting Professor at Stanford University, the California Institute of Technology, and Cornell University. Between 1988 and 1993 Lord Oxburgh was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence, and subsequently became Rector of Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, until January 2001.

He has been a member of the Natural Environment Research Council, and the Advisory Council for Science and Technology. For three years, since 1994, he chaired the UK Inter-Agency Committee on the Environment and Global Change, and was also a member of the Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust Board.

In 1995-6, Lord Oxburgh served as a member of the National Academies Policy Advisory Group working party on the future of the national research base and also served as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He was recently a member of the National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education (the Dearing Committee), and of the North Committee into the future structure of Oxford University.