Dr. Gregory Burke - Chief Executive of DisabledGo

Potted Biography

Gregory, like many disabled people was not born with his disability, he acquired it at the age of 16 and was hospitalised over a period of nearly four years.

Without the usual academic qualifications as a result of his time in hospital and rehabilitation, Gregory secured an interview at King’s College Cambridge and went onto win his undergraduate place there.

His career at Cambridge was beset with physical difficulties – especially access difficulties – and it was largely to help overcome these severe obstacles and actually do something about it that led him to devise a nation-wide strategy to overcome them: Gregory founded, and set up, DisabledGo.

While still an undergraduate, Gregory set up and co-ordinated an unprecedented national consultation exercise among disabled people and representatives from May 2000 to September 2003, from which he secured over one hundred public endorsements from disability organisations and charities for DisabledGo’s aims and methods.

Any new venture is fraught with difficulties but if you imaginatively place yourself in Gregory’s position as an undergraduate with no money and virtually no work experience you may have some notion of the difficulties he faced.

DisabledGo is now the most popular resource for disability access information. All the information is available free at the point of use.

The success of the project led Cranfield’s MBA Magazine to describe Gregory as ‘one of the UK’s leading social entrepreneurs’. Recently, Gregory was honoured to be invited as one of a select number of leading business people to a Business Leadership Summit on Corporate Responsibility at HM Treasury, led by the Chancellor and in the presence of the Prince of Wales.

A returning Guest Lecturer on the Cranfield MBA Social Entrepreneurship course, Gregory has appeared regularly in news and discussion programmes on national and regional media concerning disability and business matters such as live interviews on BBC Breakfast News, News 24, Radio 4’s Today and You & Yours Programmes. He has provided consultancy, advice for, and delivered speeches to, several HM Government departments.He has been featured in a number of editorials in disability related media such as Disability View, Disability Now and Mature Tymes as well as being the subject of an in-depth articles in the Financial Times.

Gregory read History at King’s College, University of Cambridge winning the Doncaster Prize. He was subsequently awarded the Newton Scholarship – 1 of only 10 awards available across the whole University to cover all fees and living expenses – for his MPhil study of political conferences. Unlike the PhD, the MPhil is ranked, and on submission, Gregory was awarded the equivalent of a ‘First’. On the basis of this success, he was again awarded a further Newton Scholarship for his PhD historical study on personal interaction and leadership.

Gregory is 35 years old and married to Jane. They live in Cambridge.