On the move

Chris Gamble, 48, is to be the first woman director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House in London, a leading institute for the analysis of international issues. Now director of the British Council in France, she took a first-class degree at Royal Holloway and has served in Moscow, New Delhi, Harare and Athens.

Lawrence Howells, 42, has become secretary of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council. Previously the council's principal funding and policy officer, he succeeds Steve Cannon, who becomes secretary to the University of Aberdeen.

Alasdair Muir Breckenridge, 61, professor of clinical pharmacology and head of the department of pharmacology and therapeutics at Liverpool University, becomes chairman of the Committee on Safety of Medicines succeeding Michael Rawlins, who retires in December.

Chris Hughes, 53, starts this month as chief executive of the Further Education Development Agency from his former post as principal of Gateshead College, Tyne and Wear. He is reorganising the senior management team to bring in four new directors responsible for services, communications, research and development and business performance.

John Walker, 57, a Nobel prize-winning molecular biologist, takes over next month as head of the Dunn Nutrition Unit, Cambridge, where he is expected to lead a restructuring of the unit. Obesity expert at Dunn, Andrew Prentice, will be leaving to join the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, taking a team with him. His wife, Ann Prentice, remains to head a new resource centre for human nutrition research.

Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, has brought in eight new people to university chairs. From Brunel University, Julian Evans takes up a chair in materials and David Wooton a chair in 18th century history. Peter Much-linski comes from the LSE to Drapers' chair of law; Michael Blakeney, from Murdoch, Perth to the Herchel Smith chair of intellectual property law; Richard Baillie, from Michigan State, to a chair in economics; Martin Thornhill, from Manchester, to a chair in clinical oral science; Anne Janowitz, Warwick, to a chair in English; and Peter Coveney, from Schlumberger Cambridge Research, to a chair in physical chemistry.

Tim Ingold, professor of anthropology at the University of Manchester with particular interest in the circumpolar North, now on a two-year research leave, is to take up a new chair in social anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. Anthropology is to be introduced as an undergraduate degree next year.