The College is very much looking forward to welcoming alumnus and Honorary Fellow Sir David Omand this weekend. Sir David will be in Cambridge speaking in the McCrum Lecture Theatre as part of the Cambridge  Alumni Festival. He will also attend the MacCurdy Reunion Dinner.

As laid out in his new book, 'How to Survive a Crisis', Sir David will speak from his own experience of crisis in government as well as historic examples such as Chernobyl, 9/11, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the Wanna Cry ransomware cyberattack. Following many remarkable years at the top of the security and intelligence world, he will offer a unique insight into how the latest intelligence strategies can help us survive the multiplying crises of the future, as well as allow us to spot them early and lessen their devastating consequences.

About Sir David Omand

Sir David is a Visiting Professor in the War Studies Department, King’s College London. He is a member of the advisory board of Paladin Capital, investing in cyber security start-ups. During his long career in British government service he held senior posts in security, intelligence and defence. 

He was Director of GCHQ (the UK Signals Intelligence and Cyber Security Agency), Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office and UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter-terrorism strategy and “homeland security”. He also served in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Policy and was Principal Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Defence during the Falklands conflict. He served for three years with the Diplomatic Service as the UK Defence Counsellor in NATO, Brussels. He served for seven years on the UK Joint Intelligence Committee. 

 He was educated at the Glasgow Academy and was a foundation scholar in economics at Corpus, where he is an Honorary Fellow. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by Birmingham and Glasgow University. He gained a first in maths and theoretical physics with the Open University in 2008. He has written extensively on security and intelligence matters with Securing the State (Hurst, 2010), Principled Spying: the Ethics of Secret Intelligence (with Professor Mark Phythian, Oxford University Press, 2018), How Spies Think: 10 Lessons in Intelligence (Penguin, 2020) and most recently How to Survive a Crisis: Lessons in Resilience and Avoiding Disaster (Penguin Viking, 2023).