Diane Coyle is Bennett Professor of Public Policy and director of research at the University’s Bennett School of Public Policy. She is an economist specialising in the economics of new technologies, economic statistics, and digital markets and competition policy. She was previously Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester. She has held a number of public policy roles, and is currently a member of the UK Government’s Industrial Strategy Advisory Council and an adviser to the Competition and Markets Authority. Previously she was Vice-Chair of the BBC Trust, and a member of the Migration Advisory Committee, the Natural Capital Committee, and the Competition Commission.

Communicating economics is a passion. Diane has been a contributor to the free online CORE economics curriculum and the associated textbook The Economy. She also programmes the annual Festival of Economics in Bristol, which started in 2011. Her books include Markets, State and People: Economics for Public Policy, GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, The Economics of Enough: How to run the economy as if the future matters, and The Soulful Science (all Princeton University Press). She was previously Economics Editor of The Independent and started out working at the Treasury and in the private sector as an economist.

Diane also founded the consultancy Enlightenment Economics, where she has worked extensively on the impacts of mobile telephony in developing countries and is contributing editor in a small publishing joint venture, Perspectives, with the London Publishing Partnership.

She read PPE at Brasenose College, Oxford, and her PhD is from Harvard. Diane was awarded the CBE for her contribution to the public understanding of economics in 2018. She is married to Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent.