Gillian Boal works at the Wellcome Trust in London. She is head of Conservation and Collections Care at the Wellcome Library. For most of her career she worked at the University of California, Berkeley in the Main Library as the Hans Rausing Conservator in charge of Conservation Treatment. She trained in Book Conservation at Camberwell College in the mid-1970s and afterwards worked with Sandy Cockerell at Cockerell & Son in Grantchester, England. She moved to the US in 1982 to work at NEDCC in Massachusetts, and in 1985 moved to Berkeley, California.