Catherine Palmer

Catherine, who joined the Board of Trustees of the Pasteur Foundation UK in March 2026, is a bilingual (French-English) lawyer, linguist and teacher. She grew up in London and attended the Lycée Français de Londres.

She studied in Paris (hypokhâgne/ khâgne at the Lycée Condorcet and Sorbonne) then returned to England to do a Postgraduate Certificate in Education at Oxford.

Catherine taught French in Inner London schools for two years after which she started an eight-year career in lexicography. She worked for Macmillan, Collier Macmillan and Larousse, before working as an editor on the first edition of the Oxford-Hachette French Dictionary. Following the launch of this major publishing project and realising that the semantic skills she used in editing dictionaries had much in common with law, she read Jurisprudence at Queen's College, Oxford, gaining her law degree in two years. She trained with Slaughter and May in the City of London and Brussels and then joined a couple of West End firms before moving in-house.

Her career as General Counsel in fashion, food, retail and hospitality of international groups spanned over twenty years. She then returned to private practice to head up a “French desk” as partner of a leading national law firm.

Catherine continues to advise companies as a fractional GC, coaches junior lawyers in comparative law and sits on boards of Franco-British charities and companies in education, retail, data and medicine.

In recognition of her contribution to Franco-British relations, she was awarded the ordre national du Mérite by the French Republic in 2017.