Lady Patricia Mirrlees

Patricia is Scottish. Upon graduation, she spent two years on Voluntary Service Overseas in Nigeria, followed by a teaching certificate and a postgraduate degree on 19th century European linguists in the Senegambia. She spent ten and a half years in Beijing editing and writing articles for the magazine Chinese Literature and Panda Books. She also wrote articles for China Daily and Western papers and broadcast programmes for Radio Beijing. She taught in the English department of Beijing Normal University. She worked with the State Science and Technology Commission as the East-West Center (EWC)’s China Program Representative. She served on the scientific committee and participated in Ombre elettriche, the largest retrospective of Chinese films shown in the West at Torino. She was a consultant for China: Ballet, a Thames Television documentary film.

After leaving China and a year at Macau University, she worked for five years at the EWC, Honolulu, Hawai’i. In Cambridge she worked at the Judge Business School and at the Chinese Department, Faculty of Oriental Studies.

After retirement, she spent some years with her husband, Professor Sir James Mirrlees, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Melbourne University. She has acted as a China consultant. She was Operations Director and a member of the Steering Committee to the 4th Nobel Laureates Symposium on Global Sustainability organized by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Asia Society Hong Kong Center. She was an Advisor to the first Cambridge Global Conversation on the Ethics of Climate Change. She was a Member of the Audit and Executive Committees of the Great-Britain China Centre for five years and was on the London Committee of Human Rights Watch (1996 – 2020). She was chair of the Trustees of Friends of the Alola Foundation, a charity she established in East Timor.