Donnelly, who is also P&G UK’s corporate marketing director, joins marketing professor Patrick Barwise, Dunnhumby’s co-founder Clive Humby and WPP’s Martin Sorrell and Jeremy Bullmore in becoming an official advocate for the research sector.

At P&G Donnelly is responsible for marketing for all brands and has helped launch the P&G ‘Thank you Mum’ campaign and Olympic sponsorship campaigns across the P&G brand portfolio, including the ‘Capital Clean Up’ campaign.

She is chair of Cosmetic Executive Women, past-president of Women in Advertising and Communications London, a fellow and past-president of the Marketing Society and an ASA Council member.

• Donnelly, Barwise, Humby and Bullmore are among the big names featured in the launch edition of Impact, the new quarterly magazine from the MRS, out next week. It features a special report on foresight, profiles of HarperCollins, McDonald’s and Yeo Valley and an interview with big data’s big daddy Doug Cutting, the co-developer of Hadoop. Follow Impact on Facebook and Twitter.