Alumni Impact: An Evening with Our President

Dr. Lilley’s 20-year business career has spanned consulting, banking, and insurance. It has involved strategy and operations, leadership and innovation, scale and start-ups. He has worked across Europe, North and South America, and South-East Asia, and spent seven years as the CEO of Africa for Prudential, where he led the team that built from scratch a business that had over a million customers, $200m of revenue and created thousands of jobs.

Education has always been Dr. Lilley’s passion, having been a student, an academic, a teacher, a high school governor, and a board member at Sheffield Hallam University in his hometown. He has seen from personal experience and in his work across the world the impact that education can have on individuals’ lives, communities, and society. Over the course of his career, the industries Dr. Lilley has worked in have been transformed—by innovation, technology and data, disruptive business models, greater consumer focus, and a growing sense of purpose and recognition of the impact of business on our society and our planet. Education is no different and Dr. Lilley aims to put Hult at the center of that.

Dr. Lilley has a bachelor's in mathematics and a PhD in theoretical physics from Cambridge University in the UK. He was a Thouron Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and a post-doctoral scientist at Heidelberg University in Germany. In his business career, he worked for Boston Consulting Group, Sanford Bernstein, Lehman Brothers, and Prudential plc.

Dr. Lilley lives in London with his wife and two daughters and enjoys playing and watching sports, wildlife photography, and continuing to study. Currently, he is taking lessons in French and learning to play the drums.