Tamsyn Barton took up her post as director-general, lending operations outside the EU and candidate countries at the European Investment Bank in November 2010. She began her career in development with a year of voluntary work for a range of local NGOs in South India before taking her first post in field management of water and sanitation projects in 1994 at the UK's Overseas Development Administration, later known as the Department for International Development (DFID). On returning to the UK, she worked as a senior manager in an international NGO, the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG - now Practical Action) from 1998 to 2001. She then rejoined DFID as a civil servant, initially as social development advisor, and later in a range of policy and management roles covering infrastructure, energy, the environment and climate change, rural livelihoods, trade and conflict. From 2007 she was head of the EU Department, which became from 2008, the Europe Department as it took on the management of the UK bilateral programs in the Western Balkans and Moldova. During this time she was DFID's alternate director on the EIB Board until April 2010. She studied at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and East. She held a post-doctoral fellowship at Cambridge as well as other scholarships and published two books and a number of articles.