As Director of The Ruskin – Museum & Research Institute at Lancaster University, Professor Sandra Kemp is responsible for strategic leadership of The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection, the preeminent collection of works by the epoch-defining writer, artist and environmentalist, John Ruskin (1819-1900). She developed the overarching vision and led the successful fund-raising campaign to secure The Ruskin Whitehouse Collection for Lancaster University, via the largest grant awarded in 2019 by the National Heritage Memorial Fund.

Throughout her career Sandra has combined appointments in universities and museums, including the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Southampton, and Imperial College London; and the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. She has an international track record of working across the arts and sciences, and of championing the role of museums in education. At The Ruskin’s Research Institute, Sandra leads a team of researchers across fields from art history to artificial intelligence, and from material and data science to heritage and futures studies. Sandra is a member of the international jury of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and consults for international organisations on issues relating to heritage in conflict zones, collections management, and digitisation. She also investigates works of art for authorship and provenance. Her recent and forthcoming publications examine relationships between nineteenth century scientific and aesthetic traditions in the detailed observation of nature in art. She is the editor of the New Frontiers section of the Oxford University Press Intersection Environmental Change and Human Experience.