James Clerkin

James John Clerkin — known professionally as Jim Clerkin — was the long-serving Pensions Manager and Secretary to the Trustees of the MRC Pension Scheme, the defined-benefit pension fund of the UK Medical Research Council (now part of UK Research and Innovation). Companies House records show he was appointed Secretary of MRC Pension Trust Limited on 15 December 2004 and resigned that role on 30 September 2023, indicating a departure or retirement after nearly two decades running the scheme. Because of that 2023 departure, the MRC head-office email and phone number in the source stub are very likely no longer active.

He is a highly credentialed pensions professional, holding the designations FCII (Fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute), FPMI (Fellow of the Pensions Management Institute), and Dip IEB. In his role he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the scheme — a final-salary (defined-benefit) arrangement reported to be in surplus, with active, deferred, pensioner and associate members — and served as the principal link between the executive, the scheme administrator, and the Board of Trustees. Public references and professional recommendations note earlier experience in financial services, including work associated with NatWest, before his pensions-management career.

Contemporaries describe him as an unusually effective communicator with trustees, members and service providers, operating on the principle that it is "better to over- than under-communicate." He engaged professional secretariat and governance support (via CBC Pension Services, since acquired by Ross Trustees) so he could focus on strategic trustee matters during board meetings. The scheme's actual trustee board is a separate governance body chaired by an independent trustee and made up of company-appointed and member-nominated directors; Clerkin's role was executive and secretarial rather than as a voting trustee.

It is important to note the framing: Clerkin is a pension-scheme manager, not a venture/angel investor. Any "investment" activity attributable to him is in his stewardship of an institutional fund that allocates capital to external managers.

• Acts institutionally, not personally: the MRC Pension Scheme invests as a Limited Partner in private equity and venture capital funds; per PitchBook the scheme has made 17 fund commitments, with its most recent commitment made to a Partners Group vehicle.
• Objective is liability-driven and diversification-focused — the aim is to fund defined-benefit pension liabilities and keep the scheme in surplus, not to chase early-stage venture returns.
• Private-market exposure is obtained through diversified fund and fund-of-funds structures rather than direct, single-company bets; underlying company selection is delegated to the general partners of the funds it backs.
• No publicly stated seed-stage or angel investment thesis exists for Mr Clerkin personally. Founders seeking angel/seed capital are unlikely to find a relevant counterparty here.