Michele Dougherty
STFC Executive Chair since 2025; space physicist and Cassini mission magnetometer investigator.
STFC Executive Chair Michele Dougherty said the 27 July 2026 funding settlement, a 2.7% science-budget cut over four years with overall funding held flat, delivers a more focused portfolio, as one facility, Clara, is mothballed.
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Professor Michele Dougherty has been STFC's Executive Chair since January 2025, having previously been Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College London, where she also headed the physics department. She was principal investigator on the magnetometer instrument aboard NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn, work that helped establish evidence for a subsurface ocean beneath the moon Enceladus, and she holds a CBE.
In July 2025 she was appointed the UK's first female Astronomer Royal in the post's 350-year history, acting as an official adviser to the monarch on astronomical matters.
She now leads STFC through the same funding settlement that has placed UKRI's wider allocation decisions under sustained parliamentary and sector scrutiny, giving her a dual role as working scientist and steward of a shrinking Science budget.
Dougherty defends a shrinking STFC budget
STFC published new funding details on 27 July 2026 confirming its Science budget will fall 2.7% over four years even though its overall settlement holds flat. Money is shifting from research grants into repairing ageing buildings and equipment, and one facility, Clara, is being mothballed.
As STFC's Executive Chair, Dougherty called the result a more focused portfolio, a framing that follows five days after UKRI confirmed a separate 58% cut to STFC's national laboratories and after UKRI's own chief executive faced Lords questioning on the wider funding approach on 14 July. Her assessment sets the institutional line on a settlement that lands most heavily on frontline physics research.
