Professor Lisa Jardine CBE, FRS was a distinguished British historian of the early modern period, a writer and a broadcaster. From 1990 to 2011 she was Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London. From 2008 to Jan 2014 she was Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). In 2012 she became the first director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities at UCL. She is a regular presenter of ‘A Point of View’ on BBC Radio 4. In 2015, he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society.
A former Chair of Judges of the Man-Booker Prize, she was the author of a number of books including Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (Macmillan UK); On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren (HarperCollins UK); The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man who Measured London (HarperCollins UK) and Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (HarperCollins).
Lisa Jardine died in October 2015.