Senior officer profiles
Unless otherwise stated, the contact address for senior officers is:
The University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL
As well as reading our senior officer profiles below, you can find out more about the people who hold key roles in governing the University:
- Chancellor: Nazir Afzal OBE
- Chair of the Board of Governors: Phillipa Hird
- Pro-Chancellor: Jim Hancock
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President and Vice-Chancellor
Our current President and Vice-Chancellor is Professor Duncan Ivison, who joined the University in August 2024.
Read Duncan's full biography and find out more about what the President is responsible for.
Professor Luke Georghiou, Deputy President and Vice-Chancellor
Professor Luke Georghiou is the University’s Deputy President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, providing strategic leadership and operational management across the full-range of University functions.
From 2010 to 2017 as Vice President for Research and Innovation, Luke was responsible for the University’s research strategy and its implementation and doctoral training, prior to this he held the post of Deputy Dean and Associate Dean for Research in the Faculty of Humanities. He continues in his current role to be responsible for business engagement and commercialisation activities. He is active in research and policy advice to government and business with work on innovation management, public procurement and innovation and evaluation of the national demonstrator project for Internet of Things (CityVerve).
Luke has chaired, and been a member of, several high-level inquiries and advisory bodies, including being rapporteur of the influential Aho Group report to European leaders, 'Creating an Innovative Europe' which put demand-side innovation policy onto the political agenda. He was a member of RISE, the European Commissioner for Research and Innovation’s high-level policy advisory group. He has chaired several international panels, and was Chairman of the High-level Expert Group on Rationales for the European Research Area which recommended a refocusing of European research and innovation support on a series of grand challenges. He was Co-Champion of the 2016 Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF), Europe’s largest pan-disciplinary science conference.
He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Manchester Science Partnerships, the UK’s largest science park company. Since 2016 he has chaired the Steering Committee of the European Universities Association Council for Doctoral Education. He is on the editorial board of eight journals and has published extensively in leading outlets including Science and Nature. He was elected to the Academia Europaea in 2011.
He is Professor of Science and Technology Policy and Management and holds a PhD (1982) and BSc from The Victoria University of Manchester. Luke was Director of the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research where he had been on the staff of its precursor institute, PREST, since 1997 and was its Executive Director from 1990 to 2004.
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 5933
Email: luke.georghiou@manchester.ac.uk
Patrick Hackett, Registrar, Secretary and Chief Operating Officer
Patrick Hackett took up his role as Registrar, Secretary and Chief Operating Officer on 1 October 2018. Previously Patrick was Deputy Vice-Chancellor at The University of Liverpool, a position he took up in August 2013, having formerly been Chief Operating Officer since November 2008. Prior to that he held the position of Director of Facilities Management.
An architect by profession, Patrick has a BArch from University College Dublin and has previously held senior leadership positions at The University of Reading and Royal Holloway, University of London. He has also been a consultant, advising higher education institutions across the UK on facilities management organisation and development and the delivery of major capital projects. Patrick was a non-Executive Director of Aintree University Hospital NHS trust for six years until the end of March 2015.
Patrick heads up the PS Leadership Team.
To get in touch with Patrick, please contact:
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 2066
Email: patrick.hackett-REGISTRAR@manchester.ac.uk
Professor Colette Fagan, FAcSS, Vice-President for Research
Professor Colette Fagan is the University of Manchester’s Vice-President for Research, responsible for leading the University’s research and doctoral training strategy.
Previously Colette was the Deputy Dean and Vice-Dean for Research for the Faculty of Humanities and served concurrently as a Senate-elected representative on the University’s Board of Governors. She is an appointed member of UKRI’s Research England Council, chaired the Russell Group’s PVC-Research Group (2018-2023), and serves on the UUK PVC Research and Innovation Group, and the N8 research partnership Senior Executive Group.
Her commitment to enabling interdisciplinary research includes co-authorship of British Academy’s report Crossing Paths: Interdisciplinary institutions, careers, education and applications.
Colette is an elected Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences in recognition of her research and policy impact focussed on working conditions and job quality, gender relations and inequalities, working-time and time-use, and international comparative analysis.
She has held visiting academic appointments at universities and research institutes in Australia, Germany and the USA. Her research has been supported by major national and international funders, including the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the European Union’s research framework programmes.
Her research and policy advice includes advisory roles and consultancy with the European Commission and its Eurofound agency, the European Parliament, the United Nations’ International Labour Office and the OECD; and various national government agencies, trade unions and employers’ associations in the EU, Australia, Japan and South Korea.
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 8860
Email: colette.fagan@manchester.ac.uk
Professor Nalin Thakkar, Vice-President for Social Responsibility
Professor Nalin Thakkar is Vice-President for Social Responsibility – working to positively impact both society and the environment – having been previously our Associate Vice-President for Risk, Compliance and Research Integrity.
Nalin is a clinical academic who has been associated with the University for more than 40 years. He undertook his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Manchester and after serving as a lecturer and senior lecturer, he was appointed to Chair of Molecular Pathology in 2003. He was then appointed as Associate Vice-President for Risk, Compliance and Research Integrity in 2010. He is also a Consultant Histopathologist at the Manchester University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and leads a specialist head and neck histopathology service.
Nalin has previously served as the National Advisor to the Health Research Authority and as a National Research Ethics Advisor to the National Research Ethics Service. In 2015, he was appointed to serve as a Non-Executive Director of the Health Research Authority by the Secretary of State for Health. Nalin has also previously served as an Interim Executive Board member of a primary school in Manchester and is currently on the Board of The Walton Centre NHS Trust on Merseyside.
He was listed in the top 50 most influential BAME public sector leaders in the UK in 2017 by Inclusive Boards.
The University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9NT
Tel: +44 (0)161 275 2227
Email: n.thakkar@manchester.ac.uk
Professor April McMahon, Vice-President for Teaching, Learning and Students
Professor April McMahon has been Vice-President for Teaching, Learning and Students at The University of Manchester since October 2019. Previously, she held academic and leadership roles at the Universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Aberystwyth and Kent.
April was born in Edinburgh and grew up in the Scottish Borders. She was the first in her family to go to university and took her MA and PhD at Edinburgh – where she was proud to be awarded an Honorary Doctorate in 2014.
Her academic field is linguistics. Her research interests include: how and why languages change; the use of computational methods to group languages into families; the evolution of language in humans; and the history of varieties of English and Scots.
April is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the Learned Society of Wales. She is an Honorary Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, and a member of the Board of Trustees of The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 5571
Email: vp-tls@manchester.ac.uk
Professor Allan Pacey, Interim Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
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Allan joined the University in August 2023 and became Interim Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health in January 2024. Prior to joining Manchester, he held roles as Head of the Department of Oncology and Metabolism and Head of the Department of Infection, Immunity and Cardiovascular Disease at the University of Sheffield.
His experience in senior leadership roles is combined with an international reputation for research in andrology (male reproductive health). Allan’s research has regularly crossed traditional disciplinary boundaries, and he has worked with physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists, meaning he is well placed to support our own interdisciplinary approach to research.
He also has significant experience of running laboratories and facilities (such as tissue banks) and alongside his academic role, he spent 17 years as Head of Andrology for Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. With a track record of securing grant income from MRC, ESRC, CRUK, NIHR and the Wellcome Trust, Allan has also engaged with many external partners in more than 60 consultancies with a range of start-up companies, SMEs, and large multinational pharmaceutical companies. He is also an experienced science communicator and has helped make a dozen TV programmes and has appeared on many news channels and in newspapers.
In 2014 Allan was awarded a Fellowship ad eundem of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in recognition of his ‘contributions to the speciality and the wellbeing of women’. In 2016, he received an MBE from Her Majesty the Queen for Services to Reproductive Medicine. In 2023, he was also made an Honorary Member of the British Fertility Society, the 38th in the Society’s 50-year history.
Email: allan.pacey@manchester.ac.uk
Professor Fiona Devine, Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities
Professor Fiona Devine became Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities in August 2023.
At the University – which she joined in 1994 – she is a Professor of Sociology and was previously Head of Sociology (2004 to 2007), Head of the School of Social Sciences (2009 to 2013) and Head of Alliance Manchester Business School (2013 to 2023). Prior to Manchester she worked at the University of Liverpool, the Policy Studies Institute, and the former Department of Employment in London. She studied Sociology and Government as an undergraduate at the University of Essex where she also completed her MA and PhD.
Fiona's research interests are in the fields of social stratification and mobility (with a comparative focus including the US), work and employment, and politics and participation. Much of her research has been funded by grants from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Leverhulme Trust. With a team of colleagues, she was involved in the BBC’s Great British Class Survey, an online survey completed by more than 300,000 people, and a class calculator completed by 9 million people. The results appeared in the book, Social Class in the 21st Century, published by Penguin in 2015.
Fiona was a member of the ESRC and Chair of its International Advisory Committee (2003 to 2007), a member of the Governing Council of the European Science Foundation and the UK representative on the New Opportunities for Research Funding Co-operation Agency in Europe Network Board. She has held visiting positions at the Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and the Institute for Social Science Research, University of Queensland, and was a member of the Research Evaluation Committee for Education and Human Society for Excellence in Research for Australia.
Fiona was a member of the Assembly of the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce (2015 to 2023) and a Chair of the North West Citizen’s Panels for the Bank of England (2018 to 2023). She was awarded an OBE in 2010 and a CBE in 2019 for services to social sciences, elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2011 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in 2014. Fiona is also a companion of the Chartered Management Institute.
Office of the Dean, 182-184 Waterloo Place, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL
Email: fiona.devine@manchester.ac.uk
Professor Martin Schröder, Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering
Professor Schröder gained his BSc in Chemistry from the University of Sheffield, and PhD from Imperial College, University of London. After postdoctoral fellowships at the ETH, Zürich and at the University of Cambridge, he was appointed to a Senior Demonstratorship at the University of Edinburgh in 1982. He was subsequently promoted to Lecturer, Reader and then Professor, and in 1995 was appointed to the University of Nottingham as Head and Professor of Inorganic Chemistry. He was Head of the School of Chemistry at Nottingham (1999-2005) and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science (2011-2015). In 2015, he moved to his current position as Vice-President and Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemistry at The University of Manchester.
Martin has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and the Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France. He has published more than 540 papers and patents and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC). His awards include the Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Royal Society of Edinburgh Support Research Fellowship, Tilden Lecturer of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Royal Society of Chemistry award for the Chemistry of Transition Metals, a Royal Society Wolfson Merit Award, a Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship, and the Royal Society of Chemistry award for Chemistry of the Noble Metals and their Compounds.
He holds a Honorary Doctorate from Tallinn Technical University, Estonia and from the Nikolaev Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been awarded many research awards including two ERC Advanced and two Proof of Concept grants, and EPSRC Programme and Russian Mega grants. In 2016 he was elected Member of the Academia Europaea, and in 2020 he was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Nyholm Prize for Inorganic Chemistry. He is currently a member of Council of EPSRC.
Martin has published 550 publications and has an h index of 83 with more than 29,000 citations. His research interests lie in coordination and materials chemistry, specifically the design, synthesis and study of porous metal organic framework materials for energy and environmental applications. Current focus lies in the separation and capture of fuel and toxic gases, hydrocarbons and metal values, and applications of porous materials in catalysis, clean-up and proton conductivity.
The University of Manchester, Sackville Street Building, Sackville Street, Manchester M13 9PL
Tel: +44 (0)161 306 9112
Email: m.schroder@manchester.ac.uk
Professor Richard Jones, Vice-President, Regional Innovation and Civic Engagement
Richard Jones is Professor of Materials Physics and Innovation Policy at The University of Manchester; and an experimental soft matter physicist.
His first degree and PhD in Physics both come from Cambridge University and, following postdoctoral work at Cornell University, USA, he was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. He was a Professor of Physics at the University of Sheffield from 1998, moving to Manchester in 2020.
In 2006 Richard was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, in recognition of his work in the field of polymers and biopolymers at surfaces and interfaces and in 2009 he won the Tabor Medal of the UK’s Institute of Physics for his contributions to nanoscience.
He is the author of more than 190 research papers, and three books, Polymers at Surfaces and Interfaces (with Randal Richards, CUP 1999), Soft Condensed Matter, (OUP 2002), and Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life (OUP 2004).
He was Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation at Sheffield from 2009 to 2016, was a member of EPSRC Council from 2013 to 2018, and chaired Research England’s Technical Advisory Group for the Knowledge Exchange Framework.
Richard was a member of the Sheffield/Manchester Industrial Strategy Commission and has written extensively about science and innovation policy, for example in the recent report The Missing Four Billion: making research and development work for the whole UK (with Tom Forth, NESTA 2020) and is currently a member of the BEIS R&D Place Advisory Group.
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Carol Prokopyszyn, Chief Financial Officer
Carol has made a significant impact within higher education, including at the University of Dundee, Loughborough University and the University of Leicester, where she navigated the financial complexities of our sector, ensured financial sustainability and, most recently, led a significant financial turn-around programme. This included completing the £300 million Tay Cities Deal in partnership with local councils and a focus on sustainable financial investments.
Tel: +44 (0)161 27 52145
Email: carol.prokopyszyn@manchester.ac.uk
Eleanor Morrissey, Director of People and Organisational Development
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Eleanor (Ele) is a leading human resources professional with experience of successful leadership over 28 years. This has included being a Global HR Director at Genus Plc – a FTSE 250 biotech company, the Cooperative and the Aspire Group – a commercial business that provides housing, training, and neighbourhood and business services.
Throughout her career she has had a strong focus on data and technology, leading numerous initiatives, leading to more efficient working patterns for staff and smoother processes for people across the organisations.
As well as these roles, Ele has also been the Chair of The Gingerbread Centre – a homelessness charity supporting families across Staffordshire – where she worked to improve governance and developed a new strategy. She was a governor at the University of Staffordshire.
Ele holds an MA in Strategic Human Resources Management and has been a fellow of the CIPD for more than 20 years.