Our people
For contact details, click on a team member's picture.
Christine Yeates
Christine leads the operations of the CIEP and is responsible for the office team. She works with the Council to develop and shape the plan of work to meet the Institute’s Charter Objects and helps guide strategic planning to ensure the organisation remains valued and relevant to its members and the wider profession.
Christine also oversees the financial performance of the organisation, working alongside our external financial adviser to set targets, form budgets and ensure financial discipline.
Christine has thirty years of experience and has worked predominantly for professional membership bodies. Her background is in communications, marketing and external relations and she’s held executive director roles in communications, membership engagement, strategy and transformation. She’s also a qualified business coach.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 (0) 20 8785 6155
Cecilia Kupera
Cecilia is responsible for maintaining the CIEP's digital platform, which comprises our website, membership and events system, and online shop. Her role also involves supporting the office team with the smooth operation of key activity using her knowledge and experience of digital services.
With a keen eye for detail and a foundation in digital technology, Cecilia brings a diverse background in IT, data management and content management. Her expertise spans social media management, email marketing, graphic design and events marketing.
Cecilia holds a BA in Broadcast Journalism and a Diploma in Digital Marketing from the British Institute of Digital Marketing.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 (0) 20 8785 6155
Diane Davis
Diane organises and manages the office to ensure it runs smoothly, and liaises with CIEP members, members of the public and other contacts via email, in person and on the telephone. Her other responsibilities include tasks relating to office IT systems, website and data management, data protection, governance support for the Council, and training and conference administration. She’s also the first point of contact for complaints. Diane line manages the CIEP admin assistant, supporting her with all operational tasks.
Diane brings to the CIEP a wealth of experience in office management from her career in the public sector working for the police, NHS and in education. Sandwiched in between her public-sector roles, she worked as a freelance copyeditor with an international client base including many high-profile corporations.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 (0) 20 8785 6155
Sarah Magee
Sarah is responsible for the CIEP’s professional development portfolio, including its assessed and non-assessed e-learning courses, virtual learning courses and online CPD events. She works closely with the Learning and Professional Development Committee and the CIEP’s tutors, assessing the professional development offering to ensure it meets the needs and requirements of members and others in the editorial profession, in terms of both content and delivery style.
Sarah has worked in professional bodies and membership organisations for almost a decade and has held professional development, product development and education management roles.
Her experience also includes working on academically accredited qualifications, training courses, mentoring and CPD programmes, accreditation schemes, outreach and widening participation initiatives, and peer-reviewed factsheets and guides. Sarah has a Masters in Education from University College London and the Institute of Education.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 (0) 20 8785 6155
Donna Hibbert
Donna is the first point of contact for new members, processing their applications and making sure they receive all the information they need, including their training discount. When members apply to upgrade, Donna ensures their applications are processed correctly, acting as liaison between the applicant and the Admissions Panel.
Amongst her many varied duties as administrative assistant, Donna supports the professional development manager by allocating tutors to those enrolled on assessed courses, issuing training test certificates and responding to queries from tutors. She also plays a key role in processing internal invoices/payments and manages the emails sent to [email protected].
Donna brings a wealth of experience from working in a variety of organisations.
- Email:
- [email protected]
- Phone:
- +44 (0) 20 8785 6155
CIEP Council: current directors of the Institute
The CIEP Council comprises up to 12 directors who, following their election, hold their posts for up to two years.
Louise Harnby
Louise started her publishing life in-house, first with Williams & Wilkins in 1991 and then with SAGE Publishing from 1993–2005. In both roles she was responsible for the international marketing of academic books and journals. She went freelance in 2006, joined the Institute in that year and became an Advanced Professional Member in 2008.
Louise is a fiction line editor who works exclusively and directly with crime fiction, mystery, thriller and suspense novelists. She also creates online training courses and books that teach the art of sentence-level fiction editing and the business of editorial freelancing (including social media, marketing and branding). In 2021, Louise authored the CIEP guide Editing Fiction Containing Gender-Neutral Pronouns.
One of Louise’s editorial passions is making complex ideas accessible and visible, and she’s brought that to her CIEP work by steering initiatives that increase the Council’s transparency – including rejuvenating Council News and championing Council papers – and by leading on the review and development of the CIEP’s legal framework and strategic plan.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Denise Cowle
Denise has been copyediting and proofreading since 2011, following a career as a physiotherapist in the NHS for 25 years. She joined the SfEP in 2012 and became an Advanced Professional Member in 2015.
Denise has been an active member of the CIEP since attending her first local group meeting. She was the local group coordinator for the Glasgow group from 2014–17 and gave a session at her first conference in 2015.
Joining the Content Marketing Academy in 2015 revolutionised Denise’s approach to marketing her business, and she is a committed advocate of the principles of content marketing, applying them to both her own business and the CIEP. Denise won the Best Business Blog award from the CMA in 2017.
Denise now teaches proofreading and marketing for organisations such as Publishing Scotland, BookMachine and the CIEP and has her own expanding suite of online courses.
First as marketing director, then as vice-chair, Denise has continued to champion a growth-focused strategy for the CIEP that raises awareness, fosters engagement, and generates sales and income.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Abi Saffrey
Abi started editing and managing editorial projects in 2000, when she joined a small business-to-business publisher within the Bonnier group. She worked at Continuum, Dun & Bradstreet, and Learning and Teaching Scotland before going freelance in 2009. Abi proofreads and copyedits economics, social policy and political publications, and project manages education textbooks and resources.
Abi joined the SfEP in 2005, becoming an Advanced Professional Member in 2012. She co-created the CIEP’s Editorial Project Management course (for which she is a tutor), and wrote its Editorial Project Management guide. Abi volunteered to coordinate the SfEP blog in the summer of 2018, with that evolving into a position on the information team in January 2020. While on the information team, Abi produced the CIEP’s bimonthly external newsletter, Editorial Excellence, and continued to coordinate the blog, as well as writing several fact sheets and project managing the production of a guide. Abi was elected to the CIEP Council in September 2021.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Hester Higton
Hester started her working life as an academic historian and museum curator. In 2005 she moved into freelance editorial work, joining the Institute in the same year. She became an Advanced Professional Member in 2009 and an LCGI in Editorial Skills in 2013.
Hester’s primary editorial focus is academic texts in the arts and humanities, particularly history, theology and classics. She works for publishers and individual authors.
Hester was elected to the CIEP Council in September 2022. However, she’s been immersed in the Institute’s training programme for years. She was among the first batch of tutors recruited to work on new online courses in 2013 and has continued as a tutor since then.
She has also developed live webinar courses and enhanced the accessibility of the CIEP’s in-person training provision for editors all over the world. Efficient Editing launched in 2020 and Copyediting 1: Introduction in 2022.
She has brought all this experience to bear in discussions of the development of the new online training platform.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Graham Hughes
Graham became a full-time freelance editor and proofreader in 2013, after a 26-year IT career as an analyst, programmer, team leader and project manager. He joined the then SfEP in 2012, and became an Advanced Professional Member in 2017.
Graham has done a wide variety of editorial work, but now works mainly with business clients and with publishers of profession-oriented books, guides and papers.
Before joining the Council in 2024, Graham had been involved in the CIEP as a local group coordinator, a forum administrator, a tutor for three of the core assessed training courses, a member of the Learning and Professional Development Committee, and a writer, editor and proofreader for some of the Institute’s written materials. He has attended ten CIEP conferences and many local group meetings, and is a regular presence on the forums.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Richard Hutchinson
Richard spent 25 years working as a software engineer in the defence, telecommunications and law enforcement domains before joining the then SfEP in 2011 while retraining as a proofreader and copyeditor. He became an Advanced Professional Member in 2013, and enjoys using his maths degree and computing background in editing academic books and journal papers.
Since joining the Council as digital services director in 2018, Richard has overseen the day-to-day running and updating of the digital systems supporting CIEP operations and the membership; undertaken a complete rebranding exercise in the transfer from SfEP to CIEP; rationalised the file sharing and calendaring for CIEP operations; introduced a flexitime system to support the office staff; implemented and supported online participation in EGMs and AGMs; introduced a conference app to support and connect delegates; and researched, specified, procured, and is in the process of implementing, a new digital platform to integrate the CIEP's disparate back-office and member- and public-facing systems.
- Email:
- [email protected]
John Ingamells
John came to freelance editing later in life having first pursued a career in the Diplomatic Service followed by 10 years in the City. He served as press attaché at the British Embassy in Buenos Aires from 1990 to 1994, giving him an early appreciation of the importance of careful and accurate use of language.
He joined the then SfEP in 2015 and was elected to the CIEP Council in 2021, taking over the community remit. Since becoming a director, John has worked with the local groups in navigating the challenges of returning to in-person meetings after the pandemic. He has overseen the completion and publication of a new guide for local group coordinators and helped get three new special interest groups up and running.
John had been a forum moderator for a few years before joining the Council, giving him valuable background for his directorial role in overseeing the team of moderators. He has helped bring four new moderators onto the team.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Sharon Rutland
Sharon began her career as a primary teacher, spending twenty years in the profession. During her time in education, she supported other teachers and staff in teaching grammar and writing, and worked with pupils to boost their writing skills. Her love of writing eventually led her to pursue a career in fiction editing.
Sharon is now a full-time freelance fiction editor, working for both independent authors and publishers. She enjoys editing a variety of genres but specialises in historical fiction, fantasy and children’s fiction.
Since joining the CIEP, Sharon has been an active member. She joined her local group soon after becoming a member and attended the monthly in-person meetings. In 2022, she became a local group leader for the East Midlands. She regularly contributes to the forums, particularly the fiction forum, and has attended the last four conferences. Sharon is delighted to be voted in as a member of the Council.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Jennie Seitz
Jennie has over fifteen years of experience copyediting and proofreading academic papers for journal publication, specialising in fields such as education, information science and technology, and social sciences. Since joining the CIEP around three years ago, she has broadened her focus to include ESL textbooks and trade nonfiction and fiction. Originally from the UK, Jennie’s background includes roles as a flight attendant and English instructor in Japan, and she now lives in the US, bringing a rich global perspective to her editorial practice.
In addition to her editing work, Jennie has created a self-paced course on academic copyediting for the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA), supporting editors transitioning to academic work. A Professional Member of the CIEP, she attends the CIEP’s Cloud Club West and has travelled from the US to participate in the last three annual conferences in person.
Jennie contributes to the editing community as the newsletter editor for the EFA and Editors Canada’s Academic Editing Chapter. She also co-leads an AI-focused working group for a Community of Interest with the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) and has presented on the impact of AI on academic editing for PEN. Her clients include Big Five publishers, academic editing agencies, university presses, and independent authors and researchers.
- Email:
- [email protected]
Honorary positions
David Crystal OBE
David Crystal is one of the world's foremost experts on the subject of language and lectures to audiences throughout the world.
He is a prolific author with more than 100 books to his credit, including The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. In 2009 he published a linguistic autobiography, Just a Phrase I'm Going Through. His most recent books include Words in Time and Place (2014), The Disappearing Dictionary (2015), and Making a Point: the Pernickety Story of English Punctuation (2015). He has also been a consultant on, contributor to or presenter of numerous radio and television programmes and series.
Honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, and former president of the Society of Indexers, David Crystal was elected honorary vice-president of the SfEP in September 2004 and then honorary president in January 2016.
Susie Dent
Susie Dent is a writer and broadcaster on language. She has made over 2,000 appearances as the resident word expert on C4's Countdown, and comments regularly on TV and radio on words in the news. She has contributed to discussions on Radio 4's Woman's Hour, 15 x 15, Word of Mouth, More or Less, Today, and on Radio 5 Live's Breakfast and Drive programmes, and has been a regular panellist on R4's Wordaholics. She also frequently hosts shows on Radio Oxford.She has made guest appearances on many TV programmes including BBC Breakfast, Newsnight, This Morning and The One Show.
Susie answers notes and queries about words and phrases each week for the Radio Times, and writes a weekly column for mentalfloss.com. She has written for the Independent on Sunday, the Telegraph and the Daily Mail, and is the author of several books, including TThe Language Report, Susie Dent's Word of the Year, What Made the Crocodile Cry?, Weird Words (for children) and How to Talk Like a Local. She is currently researching another book for John Murray. She contributed to the BBC's nationwide survey on local dialects, Voices, and has been a judge on the Costa Book Awards and on the Academy Excellence Awards. She is a past President of the Samuel Johnson Society.
Susie was elected honorary vice-president of the SfEP in January 2016.
External support
