Current Governing Council Members

Governing Council Officers

• Professor Pauline Kneale, Chair, University of Plymouth
• Professor Andrea Cameron, Honorary Treasurer, Abertay University

Pauline Kneale, awarded a national Teaching Fellowship in 2002, is currently Professor of Pedagogy and Enterprise, and Director of the Pedagogic Research Institute and Observatory (PedRIO) at the University of Plymouth. Previous experience includes Directing the White Rose Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning of Enterprise at the University of Leeds 2005-10, and The Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, (2009-11).

Pauline established and directs PedRIO, one of the six cross Faculty University Institutes. Now in its eighth year, it has an excellent track record in developing staff as pedagogic researchers, and has developed a conference series which attracts staff from many Universities. Pauline’s research focuses on student skills, Masters level teaching, inclusive assessment and student’s experience of University. Recent research publications in collaboration with the PedRIO team and external partners have addressed: transition issues to university; the retention of non-traditional students; evaluating the role and impact of undergraduate research conferences; evaluating the impact of academic development interventions; and the position of pedagogic research in REF2014.

SRHE Committees:
Chair of the Governing Council
(All Committees)

Andrea Cameron is the Dean of Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences and Intellectual Lead for Teaching and Learning at Abertay University.  She was one of the first cohort to be awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in Scotland in 2018 and has been a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2015. She has progressed a number of student experience enhancement projects and presented and published work in relation to Reflective Practice, Employability, Academic Tutoring, Equity and Access of the Curriculum, Staff Profiling, Accelerated Degrees, and Fitness to Practise.

Andrea is the Chair of the Council of Deans of Health’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Policy Group and has led departmental Athena Swan and co-authored institutional Race Equality Chartermark submissions. She is both a sport scientist and a nurse and maintains an active role in the classroom. Andrea has won awards for her work engaging students with voluntary organisations, as well as for introducing EDI training for university sports club leaders. In addition to her role as SRHE’s Honorary Treasurer, she is a Trustee of the Dundee Education Trust, the Discovery Rugby Trust, Dundee Dragons Wheelchair Sports Club, and an editorial panel member and contributor for Diabetes Wellness News.

SRHE Committees:
All Committees  – Ex Officio
Member of the Management & Finance Committee

Council Members

• Dr Maria-Ligia Barbosa, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
• Dr Dina Belluigi, Queen’s University Belfast
• Professor Liz Bennett, University of Huddersfield
• Dr Kate Carruthers Thomas, Birmingham City University
• Dr Richard Davies, University of Hertfordshire
• Dr Omolabake Fakunle, University of Edinburgh
• Dr Joy Garfield, Aston University
• Dr Carolina Guzmán Valenzuela, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
• Professor Camille Kandiko Howson, Imperial College
• Professor Chris Millward, University of Birmingham
• Professor Gina Wisker, University of Bath

Maria Ligia Barbosa is a Brazilian sociologist whose work has helped shape and consolidate higher education research in Brazil and across Latin America. In 2011, she co-founded the Laboratory for Research in Higher Education (LAPES), bringing together academics from different universities to develop collaborative inquiry, debate, and policy analysis. LAPES became a hub for scientific production, seminars, and advisory work for institutions and governments. Engagement with the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) and with its journals further supported this trajectory. National funding agencies encouraged the internationalisation of research, enabling comparative studies on equity and opportunity in the expansion of higher education. This work later contributed to the establishment of the Latin American Centre for Research into Higher Education (CeLapes) at the Brazilian College of Advanced Studies/CBAE/UFRJ.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Research and Development Committee

Dina Zoe Belluigi is a Professor at the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work (SSESW) at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland); a Visiting Professor at the Chair for the Critical Studies of Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET), Nelson Mandela University (South Africa) and the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University (India).

Informed by critical traditions, her academic scholarship and practice revolves around understanding and addressing inequality and oppression within, and by, the university. Her research interests are underpinned by a concern with the politics of representation and citizenship within the university, constructions of academic authority and freedom, and the ways in which these are negotiated by intellectuals of the Majority World. She has engaged with various methods and analytical approaches; and increasingly is interested in visual and creative research about universities. She is part of an actively growing network asking questions of the idea of the African university. She serves on the SARS-Ireland (Scholars at Risk Ireland) Committee.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Research & Development Committee

Liz Bennett is Emerita Professor of Education at University of Huddersfield. In 2023 she became a National Teaching Fellow in recognition of her work promoting technology enhanced learning and leading curriculum design to promote active learning, employability, retention and inclusion. She is an editor of Research in Learning Technology and has published in the area of academics’ and students’ responses to use of digital tools.

SRHE Committees:
Chair of the Publications Committee

Richard Davies is Programme Leader for the MA Education Framework in the School of Education at the University of Hertfordshire, with a career spanning several roles in higher education research, evaluation, and academic development across the UK. Trained as a philosopher of education, he brings an analytic and critical perspective to long-term questions of policy, governance, and institutional change in higher education.

His work focuses on how universities can respond intelligently to emerging pressures—including technological change, post-truth environments, interdisciplinarity, and shifting expectations of evidence and impact—without losing sight of educational purpose. He has particular expertise in evaluation and strategic enhancement, with an emphasis on approaches that support thoughtful innovation rather than short-term compliance. He is especially concerned with how the sector can develop forms of leadership, research use, and educational design that are resilient in times of uncertainty and capable of sustaining academic values in a rapidly changing policy and technological landscape.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Management and Finance Committee

Omolabake Fakunle is Senior Lecturer at the Moray House School of Education and Sport (MHSES), University of Edinburgh. Her leadership roles at the institution includes Director, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), MHSES (2021-24), Decolonisation Lead, Curriculum Transformation Programme (2022 – 24), and Academic Convenor, Race Equality and Anti-Racist Subgroup. She Co-Leads the University’s Race Review Response Group established in 2025. Omolabake is a member of the Executive, Scottish Educational Research Association, and Affiliate Faculty, Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation (CHEI), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano. She is Chair of the EDI Working Group, Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE). Omolabake’s award-winning research, teaching, and consultancy focus on inclusivity in internationalisation, employability, and decoloniality.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Governance & Appointments Committee

Joy Garfield is a Senior Teaching Fellow and Director of Learning and Teaching for an academic department at Aston Business School.  Her subject discipline area is information systems, particularly the early stages of systems development, systems modelling and complex problem solving.  Joy has a passion for teaching and working towards improving the student experience.  With just over 20 years of experience in academia in teaching, research and management, she has worked at a number of UK universities including the University of Manchester, and the University of Birmingham. Joy has been involved with key strategic, curriculum, and quality developments through course directorship of a range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.  Joy is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and is currently an external examiner at Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Westminster.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Research & Development Committee

Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela is a Serra Húnter Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Senior Research Fellow at the Universidad de Tarapacá, Chile. For more than fifteen years, her research has examined the evolving role of universities in the twenty-first century, with a particular focus on Latin America and Chile. Her work explores how higher education systems are shaped by global forces while remaining embedded in national, regional and institutional contexts. She has contributed to global higher education and internationalisation studies, analyses of neoliberal reforms, North–South inequalities in knowledge production, the decolonisation of universities, the public role of universities, epistemic injustice and stratification in tertiary education, and the theorisation of qualitative research. She has published widely in leading international journals and has led numerous competitive, externally funded research projects as principal investigator. She has been an academic visitor in universities in the UK, Germany, Portugal, Perú, and the USA.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Publications Committee

Camille Kandiko Howson is Professor of Education in the Centre for Higher Education Research and Scholarship (CHERS) at Imperial College London. She is an international expert in higher education research with a focus on student engagement; student outcomes and learning gain; equity and social justice; and quality, performance and accountability. She is Chair of the SRHE Research and Development Committee, which she has served on since 2012. Camille has an extensive record of securing external funding from numerous sources, including UKRI; HEFCE; OfS; AdvanceHE; the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA); the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE); RAND Europe; and the British Council. She has held previous academic positions at King’s College London. She is passionate about making higher education more equitable and fair, supporting women and those underrepresented to access, succeed and work in academia. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

SRHE Committees:
Chair of the Research & Development Committee

Chris Millward is Professor of Practice in Education Policy at the University of Birmingham.  In this role he is concerned with bridging between education research and practice, with a particular focus on tertiary education systems and policy, and educational pathways and transitions across the lifecourse.  Alongside his work at Birmingham and as a SRHE Trustee, Chris is a Marshall Scholarships Commissioner, a member of the British Council’s Educational Advisory Group and Chair of the Advisory Board for the Centre for Global Higher Education.

From 2018-21, Chris served for four years as the first Director for Fair Access and Participation at England’s higher education regulator, the Office for Students.  Prior to being appointed as the access regulator, Chris was Director of Policy at the Higher Education Funding Council for England.  He joined the Funding Council in 2006 from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, where he was Head of Research Programmes from 2002-2006.

Chris grew up in Stockport and attended his local comprehensive school.  He then studied at the universities of Warwick and Manchester, and spent the first years of his career working at the universities of Warwick, Edinburgh and Durham.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Research & Development Committee

Gina Wisker, former Head of the University of Brighton’s Centre for Learning & Teaching, Professor of Higher Education & Contemporary Literature teaches and researches in learning, teaching, postgraduate study supervision and academic writing. With 25 books (some edited) and over 140 articles published including: The Postgraduate Research Handbook (2001, 2008) The Good Supervisor (2005, 2012,); Getting Published (2015). Gina also specialises in Twentieth-century women’s writing, postcolonial, Gothic & popular fictions: Key Concepts in Postcolonial Writing (2007) Horror (2005), Margaret Atwood, an Introduction to Critical Views of Her Fiction (2012) Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction (2016).Gina has supervised 31 PhD students to completion and examined 40. She chaired the Heads of Education Development Group, SEDA Scholarship &Research committee, and the Contemporary Women’s Writing association and is chief editor of the SEDA journal Innovations in Education and Teaching International, dark fantasy online journal Dissections and poetry magazine Spokes. Gina is an HEA Principal Fellow, National Teaching Fellow & SFSEDA.

SRHE Committees:
Member of the Publications Committee

Standing Committees

Governing Council oversee four sub-committees who meet regularly to oversee particular areas of activity. These Committee are:

• Governance and Appointments
• Research and Development
• Publications
• Management and Finance

To learn more about the SRHE Standing Committees and their remits visit https://srhe.ac.uk/about-srhe/standing-committees/