Sarah Springman

Dame Sarah Springman is a British-Swiss civil engineer, academic and triathlete. Born in London in 1956 and educated at Cambridge, she built her career in geotechnical engineering, becoming professor at ETH Zurich in 1997 and serving as the university's rector from 2015, only the second woman to hold the post. In 2022 she moved to Oxford as Principal of St Hilda's College. Alongside this career she raced triathlon and duathlon at elite level for Great Britain between 1984 and 1993, took part in the demonstration triathlon at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland and won twenty European Triathlon Union championship medals. As vice-president of the International Triathlon Union from 1992 to 1996 she helped bring triathlon into the Olympic programme, and she later served as the first president of the British Triathlon Federation. She was named to the ITU Hall of Fame in 2019.