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It is with great sadness that we learnt of the announcement of the passing of Shri Ratan Tata ji, a dear friend and Honorary Fellow of LSE, who passed away peacefully at the age of 86 on 9 October. He was the most steadfast of friends; attentive, caring, a man of deep compassion and humility.

Ratan Tata was a leading philanthropist in India, deeply committed to education, medicine and rural development. A visionary leader, he served as the chairman of Tata Group and Tata Sons from 1991 to 2012 and held the position of interim chairman from October 2016 to February 2017. Tata once said: “Leadership is not about being in charge, it is about taking care of those in your charge.” And a real leader he was: this quality, along with courage and solidarity with his employees, was exemplified in the terrorist attacks on the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai in November 2008, when he went straight to the hotel and stayed there for the ensuing days of the terrorist occupation.

His investments in these areas have touched millions of lives, reinforcing the Tata Group’s tradition of corporate social responsibility. As Peter Casey, author of The Story of Tata, noted, the ethos of the company “yokes capitalism to philanthropy, by doing business in ways that make the lives of others better”. This guiding principle has inspired the Tata Trusts and the family for over a century, underscoring their dedication to social causes and community upliftment. Tata embodied this ethos, as we can see by the enduring impact of his philanthropy at LSE and elsewhere.

In 2007, Tata became an Honorary Fellow of LSE for his outstanding contribution to the School and its community. Tata was an avid advocate for LSE in India and globally, serving dutifully for many years on the LSE-India Advisory Board. We are immensely grateful for his support and exemplary guidance. Over several decades, Tata enthusiastically maintained and deepened a partnership between LSE and the Tata Trust which first began over a century ago when LSE founders Beatrice and Sidney Webb visited India in 1912 and met Tata’s grandfather, Sir Ratan Tata.

Tata’s commitment to education was exemplified by the establishment of the Sir Ratan Tata Post-doctoral Fellowship in 1997, based in the LSE India Observatory. This Fellowship has supported more than 20 early career post-doctoral researchers to engage in six months of impactful social science research on economic and social development in India and South Asia.

In recognition of his contributions, Ratan Tata received the ‘Padma Bhushan’ in 2000 and the ‘Padma Vibhushan’ in 2008, the third and second highest civilian honours awarded by the Government of India, respectively. He also received various state civilian honours, including the ‘Maharashtra Bhushan’ in 2006 for his work in public administration in Maharashtra, and ‘Assam Baibhav’ in 2021 for his contributions to cancer care in Assam.

Ratan Tata was one of the truly great citizens of the world. His loss is profound, not only for India but for all who knew him or were touched by his work. His legacy will continue to inspire future generations of leaders and philanthropists, and LSE will be honoured to continue to celebrate the impact of his partnership and support.

With thanks to Professor Lord Nicholas Stern, Co-Chair of the India Observatory, for sharing this tribute.

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Vhon Barrett.

Vhon joined LSE in October 1999 and served as part of the Estates Maintenance team for almost 25 years.

He was also a member of LSE’s staff network EmbRace, and his enthusiasm for the group’s mission and community did not go unnoticed.

It is with great sadness that friends and colleagues from across the LSE share news of the death of Anne Shepherd, on Thursday 6 June 2024.

Anne joined LSE in 2002, and until her retirement last autumn, she managed the Editorial Office of Population Studies, deftly overseeing all aspects of the day-to-day production of the journal. She also served as the Secretariat for the Population Investigations Committee (PIC) and the British Society for Population Studies (BSPS). Anne’s unwavering and unparalleled commitment to her work has left an indelible mark.

Anne’s extremely competent, extremely knowledgeable, and no-nonsense approach to all she did, earned her much respect and admiration, both within and outside of the School. Countless members of the demographic research community who encountered Anne as PIC-funded MSc students, BSPS council members, authors, reviewers, and editors will have fond memories of her inimitably patient, good-humoured – but uncompromising and occasionally irreverent – manner and approach. She will be dearly missed by everyone who had the pleasure of working with her.

LSE Library is greatly saddened by the death of George Carey, a former member of the Collection Management team, a great colleague and friend to many of us. George joined LSE Library in 2000 and stayed for 21 years before retiring in 2021.

We will miss his enthusiastic contribution to the team; he had a mischievous sense of humour and was a great personality to be around. George was very supportive of his colleagues and always enjoyed helping library users.

George had a keen interest in football and music (especially Elvis Presley) and visited Liverpool several times to see the historical places associated with the football club, the Beatles, and the individual members of the group. George was also an avid traveller and visited multiple European cities, often sending postcards back to colleagues in the library detailing his numerous escapades.

He had a sharp, investigative mind and often after a shift in the Library would spend some time observing the proceedings in the Royal Courts of Justice. He never took himself too seriously and often joked about writing a sit-com based on the multiple things that could go wrong in a library.

Cheistha Kochhar was a first year MRes/ PhD student in Organisational Behaviour in the Department of Management. It is with the deepest sadness that we share the news of her tragic passing on 19 March 2024. During her short time in the department and at LSE, Cheistha left a lasting impact on everyone she encountered.

She is remembered among the PhD community for her fierce intelligence, enduring kindness and bright, positive energy which she brought with her everywhere she went, lighting up every room that she entered. Her dedication to helping and supporting others reverberated not only among her colleagues, but also among the students for whom she was a Teaching Assistant.

With her passing, the department and LSE has lost a brilliant student and a promising scholar. She was known for being way ahead of the game; she was already in the process of consolidating her dissertation structure at such an early stage of her course. Cheistha’s academic prowess was highlighted by her numerous awards and accolades including being named the (2020) Clinton Global Fellow, (2019) Irving B. Harris Scholar, (2012) TATA Scholar and (2012) Dr. Roshan Lal Trust Scholar, amongst others. She was also named the (2013) Young India Fellow by Ashoka University.

Bringing more than a decade of experience as an expert in behavioural policy to LSE, Cheistha had most recently worked as a Senior Advisor to the National Behavioural Insights Unit (BIU) of India, where she built and scaled the first BIU in the Global South, highlighting her capacity for truly transformational work.

Cheistha will be deeply missed by all those at LSE who had the privilege to meet her. If you wish to share a memory of Cheistha from her time at LSE, you can visit her memorial page here.

Cheistha’s profile from the Department of Management website:

Cheistha Kochhar holds an MA in International Development and Policy (MAIDP) from the University of Chicago and a BA (Honors) in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Delhi. Her research lies at the intersection of behaviour science and organisational strategy, with a focus on public sector organisations, social enterprises and philanthropies.

Prior to LSE, Cheistha worked as a behavioural policy expert for more than a decade, designing and scaling national programs for global institutions, including McKinsey, University of Chicago and Government of India, amongst others. Most recently, she served as the founding Senior Advisor to the National Behavioural Insights Unit (BIU) of India, where built and scaled the first BIU in the Global South. She was also a member of the founding team of Aadhar (Social Security Number equivalent of India).

Rooted in her professional experience, Cheistha’s research examines collaboration dynamics across and within the boundaries of pro-social organisations, especially towards addressing grand challenges. In an increasingly independent world, she hopes to further our understanding of emerging forms of collaborations within and across non-market organisations and uncover interventions to improve the outcomes of such collaborations. She adopts mixed methods in her research designs.

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Michael Banks on 21 March 2024.

Michael, who was a Reader in International Relations when he retired in 1999, taught in the Department for 38 years. He will be remembered for his engaging, magisterial lectures on IR theory and for his generosity with his time in discussing new ideas with students of all levels. He was also a constant source of advice and support to the student editorial teams at Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

Michael first joined the Department as a student in 1955 on the BSc (Econ) International Relations. After completing his degree in1957, he spent the next four years studying in the States, completing a two year MA in Political Science at Lehigh University, before heading to Boston where he started a doctorate in African Studies on a joint programme run by Harvard, MIT and Brandeis. He returned to the School in 1961, taking up a lectureship in the International Relations Department. Over the course of his academic career Michael also taught at universities in Nairobi, Lusaka, Geneva, Stuttgart and Frankfurt and spent time at USC and Dartmouth College.

Michael was born in 1936 in Hythe, Hampshire, where his father worked as a professional skipper on racing yachts owned by wealthy English industrialists. As a small child, he was briefly evacuated to the Oxfordshire countryside during the Second World War, but returned to the family home in Hythe for the final years of the war. There he observed the build-up to D-Day and witnessed the firebombing of Southampton across the Solent – an event which left a deep impression on him and was the root of his longstanding pacifism. At age 13 he won a place at Brockenhurst Grammar School where he thrived academically, eventually securing a place at LSE.

At LSE, both during his BSc studies and the first years of his academic appointment, Banks was initially mentored by C.A.W Manning. At the time, the Department and its undergraduate degree programme were deeply imbued with an approach to the study of international relations that is now charactersied as the ‘English School’. He fell out with Manning (or Manning with him) in the late 1960s, when Michael started to engage with the so-called ‘behavioural revolution’ in North American IR. This was the start of a characteristic feature of Michael’s academic and educational career – an interest in the theoretically new and cutting edge. This manifested itself in two important inflection points in Michael’s work.

First was his engagement with Thomas Kuhn’s work on the sociology of knowledge, the structure of scientific revolutions and the role of paradigmatic shifts in knowledge structures and ways of knowing. Michael appropriated Kuhn’s core arguments to characterise the state of IR theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s as an incommensurable ‘inter-paradigm debate’ between realist, pluralist and structural accounts of global politics. Informing the core of his lectures for both the core second year course in ‘International Politics’ and in his MSc course in ‘Concepts and Methods of International Relations’, the ‘inter-paradigm debate’ offered a framing of the discipline that shaped a generation of scholars and scholarly debate.

Second was his engagement from the late 1970s onwards with John Burton’s ‘world society’ approach and, in particular, Burton’s then avant-garde arguments for a ‘facilitated analytical problem-solving’ approach to resolving violent conflicts. Along with colleagues such as John Groom, Chris Mitchell, Tony deReuk, Richard Little and Margot Light, Banks was a member of the Centre for the Analysis of Conflict which sought to develop both the theory and practice of what is now widely characterized as ‘second’ or ‘multi-track’ diplomacy in seeking to bring an end to violent conflicts. The exploration and development of these ideas underpinned his edited volume, Conflict in World Society (1984) and Handbook of Conflict Resolution: The Analytical Problem Solving Approach (1996 with Chris Mitchell).

For many, Michael will be remembered for his brilliant and inspiring teaching – both in his lectures (which were delivered with a certain panache and were always packed) and in the seminar room where he encouraged thought provoking open-ended conversation and dialogue. He was a dedicated teacher who cared deeply about not only what students were taught, but also more importantly, how students were taught. He had very strong views on what a university education should entail. He came to abhor what he saw as the neo-liberalisation of higher education in the form of the RAE/REF and the external oversight of teaching quality in the form of the then QAA – though, ironically, his underlying pedagogy would tick many of the contemporary boxes regarding what constitutes an outstanding teaching and learning experience for students.

In his leisure time, Michael had a deep love for sailing (which he got from his father) – regularly engaging in early Sunday morning competitive sailing at the Queen Mary reservoir west of London in all kinds of weather and doing so until his mid-60s. He also had a love for horticulture. In later years, not having a garden of his own, he would vicariously satisfy this interest through visits to stately gardens and gifting friends with small fruit trees, plants, shrubs, gardening tools and books.

During his time at LSE Michael supported and encouraged many young scholars and colleagues who have gone on to become senior figures in the discipline. Many of those individuals and others across the wider IR community will long remember his kindness and generosity in helping them on their professional journeys. He will be greatly missed.

A public memorial event will be arranged with the IR Department for later in the year.

The Department of Economic History is deeply saddened by the death of Professor Nick Crafts, a former Convenor of the Department, and a great friend and colleague. He was generous with his time, and supportive of students and young scholars and, above all, very funny.

Nick was, quite literally, a giant of his field and an inspiration to many. His work with Knick Harley, reinterpreting the British Industrial Revolution remains influential and much discussed.

Nick joined the Department of Economic History at LSE in 1995 and stayed for 10 years before returning to Warwick where he was the founding Director of CAGE.

It is with deep sadness that we are sharing the news that our Language Centre colleague Doris Hermann-Ostrowski passed away unexpectedly on Friday 14 July this year from heart failure at the age of 71.

Doris joined the LSE Language Centre in 2007 and was a highly valued member of the German teaching team. She will be remembered as a very competent and meticulous professional with a passion for teaching who cared deeply about her students. She will be missed by staff and students alike.

Her funeral and cremation took place on 25 August, with family and friends in attendance.

There is a tribute page at https://rodica-dorishermann-ostrowski.muchloved.com/.