Inaugural professorial lecture of Professor Stacy Johnson MBE
04 Jun 2026, 17:30 - 19:30
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Bookings are now open.
We invite you to join us for Professor Stacy Johnson MBE's inaugural lecture, "Becoming Number Eighty-Three".
This talk is the community professorial inaugural lecture of the University of Nottingham’s, Professor Stacy Johnson MBE. As a tribute to her late mother, a music teacher, this will be a talk in three movements, examining themes of identity, inclusion and impact over the course of her 'quirky' career. Symbolically set in Cowdray Hall, it is a coming home moment for Stacy who completed her Bachelor’s degree at the original RCN Institute in the 1990’s.
In the first movement of the talk, Stacy will explore her hybrid personal, professional and disciplinary identities, and how these have shaped her work. She will share how a high-quality, degree level nursing education, still frustratingly and constantly contested, laid the unshakeable foundation for her evolution and her final incarnation as Professor of Critical Inclusive Leadership in what she calls, “the most fulfilling and nourishing career I could have hoped for”. She will take the audience through her health systems financing, health economics and policy years in London and in the School of Economics in Nottingham. This was the period that brought together the fields of labour economics and nursing that sparked her interest in nursing entrepreneurship as an emancipatory endeavour. She will focus on the significance, responsibility and symbolism of becoming the eighty third of just one hundred Black female professors out of a total of around twenty-four thousand professors in the UK - “I’ve capitalised on my weirdness and done it my way”, she says.
The middle movement, connecting identity to impact, digs deeper into Professor Johnson’s unapologetically, beautifully messy work as teacher, researcher, academic and business leader; shifting the landscape in the field of leadership studies and leadership development; adding to the conversation that has moved the field toward more intentionally critical and inclusive approaches.
Stacy will discuss the contribution she has made developing leaders at the start of their career journeys, with reference to examples, like her National and European Junior Leadership Academies for nurses and Midwives, and a wider contribution to leadership development of Allied Health Professions through the Council of Deans of Health 150 Leaders Programme. This part of the community inaugural lecture is a rather indulgent and emotional acknowledgement of the power of participatory action research (PAR), Professor Johnson’s favoured research methodology, which she has described as “transformational”. She will cover how she used PAR to generate the Reverse Mentoring for Equality Diversity and Inclusion (ReMEDI) Framework and a range of reverse mentoring models. This is arguably her most significant contribution to the field of critical, inclusive leadership studies and will perhaps be the most enduring legacy of her career. She will unpack the contradiction and tensions between the philosophical foundations of PAR and research/intellectual property commercialisation that has led to Stacy becoming one of just a handful of female academics leading a UK University spinout company. Here, she frames her founding of The Reverse Mentoring Practice Limited as perhaps her most profound act of resistance against all forms of social oppression.
As is typical of symphonic finales, and especially typical of Stacy, the final movement of the talk will be a loud, energetic, celebratory and honest dissection of the impact her work has had in the real world. She will share with the audience how her intrepid practitioner-research on inclusive leadership and reverse mentoring for equality diversity and inclusion has allowed her to influence nursing, healthcare, higher education and the commercial sector. In a closing segment, which Stacy describes as “accounting to the community”, she will recount her experiences of embedding transformative inclusion in organisations as diverse as universities, small NHS organisations with 4,000 staff, larger NHS Trusts and American mega-hospital chain Providence-Swedish with its 120,000 caregivers. She reflects on the privilege and responsibility of developing the cultural humility of leaders in a range of settings from multinational organisations like the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), commercial outfits like M&S, student leaders and healthcare and higher education leaders at home in the UK, India, China, her native Trinidad and beyond.
Professor Johnson will close by paying tribute to the people, groups and organisations, that she describes as her “village” that have been opportunity-creators, shaping her journey and considering what this means for the future of the nursing profession, healthcare, academia and business.
Registration will open soon. Please register your interest using the button above if you would like to be informed when bookings are open.
Find out more about Professor Johnson and her work.
This event will be hybrid. You can either join in person or online. In person doors will open at 5:30pm and the lecture will begin at 6:00pm. Joining links will be sent to online registrants ahead of the lecture.
See our full terms and conditions for events here.
This event is sponsored by the RCN Institute of Nursing Excellence and will be chaired by Dr Ada Hui, Head of Research, Royal College of Nursing.
Find out more about Nursing Research at the RCN.
For enquiries about the event, please email
research.enquiries@rcn.org.uk
Join us online or in person at
20 Cavendish Square
Marylebone
London
W1G 0RN
20 Cavendish Square is located behind John Lewis, Oxford Street.
Visitor car parking
Q-Park Oxford Street is an underground car park situated underneath Cavendish Square. You can pre-book your parking by visiting the Q-Park website.
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Stacy Johnson MBE is Professor of Critical Inclusive Leadership in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham. She is a leading voice on the frontier of justice, inclusion and belonging research, consultancy and practice. She helps organisations to re-imagine, re-engineer and reset their cultures for excellence.
After training as a nurse and completing a BSc in Health Studies at the Royal College of Nursing Institute, University of Manchester, Stacy read for a MSc in Economic and Quantitative Methods in Healthcare at City St Georges, University of London. From 2012 to 2024, Stacy advised England’s Chief Nursing Officers on matters affecting minority/global majority patients and staff as a member of the CNO BME Strategic Advisory Group.
She is well known as a “leadermaker”, focusing on developing leaders at the margins including students, leaders at the start of their career journey, and people from social groups under-represented in leadership. Through her award-winning National and European Junior Leadership Academies, The Council of Deans 150 Leaders programme, she has equipped people at the start of their career journey to lead now, lead well, and lead where they are.
Stacy is founder and Chief Scientific Officer of The Reverse Mentoring Practice Ltd (RMP) a University of Nottingham spin out company that applies her groundbreaking reverse mentoring framework to deliver high impact reverse mentoring programmes that improve the cultural humility of leaders and organisational influencers. Stacy and her RMP team have supported organisations in the UK, US and Europe to deliver high impact reverse mentoring programmes taking over 100 organisations as diverse as NHS Trusts, the OECD, and Providence-Swedish on this journey.
In 2019 Stacy was made a Member of the British Empire in the New Year’s Honours list for her contribution to equality, diversity and inclusion in the health and higher education sector.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stacy-johnson-mbe-1837b140/
The timings of this event are:
5.30pm: Doors open
6pm: Lecture
7pm: Drinks reception
7.30pm: Close
Eventsreg@rcn.org.uk
+44 (0)2920 546460
For any other queries relating to this event please contact Dr Ada Hui, Head of Nursing Research at research.enquiries@rcn.org.uk
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Page last updated - 30/04/2026
