Ngaire Woods came to Oxford University’s Balliol College in the 1980s from her hometown in Auckland, New Zealand on a Rhodes Scholarship. She fully intended to return home to New Zealand. But the extraordinary world of ideas and the international crossroads of thought leadership that she found there persuaded her to stay. A doctorate and a junior research fellowship followed; then a brief stint working at Harvard. But Ngaire returned to England soon, for what was the beginning of a compelling Oxford story for this internationally renowned public policy guru, the Founding Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government.
‘Some people say Oxford is extraordinarily complicated. But it is a wonderful place to innovate because there are so many different centres of power. There are a lot of different interstices that you can build in. That is what brought me back to Oxford to craft what I wanted to build.’