Nesta’s director of creative economy, Hasan Bakhshi, has been awarded an MBE for services to the creative industries in the New Year’s Honours List for 2015.

Hasan’s recent work at Nesta includes co-authoring the Next Gen skills review of the video games and visual effects industries, which led to wholesale reforms of the school ICT and computing curriculum in England, and devising the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts, a £7million fund to support arts projects that use digital technology, run in partnership with Arts Council England and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  In the New Year he will publish research on the geography of the UK’s creative and high tech economies.

Outside of Nesta, Hasan is an Adjunct Professor at the ARC Centre for Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at the Queensland University of Technology, and in 2013 was awarded an honorary Doctorate from the University of Brighton for his work on economic policy for the creative industries. Hasan is also a founding member of the government’s Creative Industries Council.