Who?
Vicky Pryce, economist.
 
Born
Vasiliki Courmouzis. An Athenian by birth she took and kept the surname of her first husband, an academic she met while studying at LSE.
 
Career
A sparkling academic career at LSE led into an equally sparkling professional career at Williams & Glyn’s Bank, where in 10 years she rose to chief economist. She then spent three years at Exonn Mobil and following that a stint at KPMG as chief economist. In 2001 Department for Trade and Industry in August 2002 as Chief Economic Adviser - the first woman ever to be appointed to the post. In 2010 she left the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills to move into consultancy.  
 
An academic who means business
Like many high flying economists, Pryce’s name is as familiar to MBA students as it is to civil servants ands executive boards. She is a visiting professor at Cass Business School and Imperial College Business school and also a visiting fellow at Nuffield College Oxford.

No stranger to hard work
She is known for working incredibly hard. For each of her five children took had only six weeks off work after giving birth, and while working at KPMG she was held up to her colleagues as an example of stamina and dogged determination.

Privatising Eastern Europe
Pryce’s greatest accomplishment is cited as her work decentralising the economies of former Soviet states in the first half of the nineties. Her twice monthly trips to Prague, the Czech Republic and Romania are said by her KMPG colleagues to have been ‘novel’ experiences for her Eastern European counterparts who weren’t used to dealing with a senior woman.

On Gordon Brown
She dismissed former Prime Minister’s five rules on the economy as ‘an informed guess’.

Climate change credentials
She has edited White Papers for the government on the economical contributions needed for sustainable energy including ‘Options for a Low Carbon Future’ (2003) and ‘Meeting the Energy Challenge’ (2007). She is also the estranged wife of Liberal Democrat MP, Chris Huhne, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

Former colleagues say
‘When it came to the privatisation of the whole of Eastern Europe, she was instrumental’.

The Independent Says
‘One of the most important columnists of her generation.’

Vicky is going to be a member of the panel in our forthcoming Shell debate, arguing for the motion, ‘London’s policy on climate change should begin in Beijing’, on Thursday 20th October at the Royal Society. Click here to buy tickets.