Dr Richard Blackwell, Deputy Vice-Chancellor
Richard Blackwell was appointed Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Southampton Solent University in August 2010. His role focuses on advancing skills strategies and partnerships, fostering social, community and ‘third stream’ engagement, and enhanced student satisfaction and employability.
Richard enjoys working in teams and collaborating with people at all levels to achieve results, which he has done at national, regional and institutional level both in the UK and abroad. He joins Solent from the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) where he worked on shaping policy and practice in learning and teaching and knowledge exchange at national level. He secured funding for 14 strategic projects in the South East, including a physics sustainability alliance (SEPNET), two institutional mergers, three new university centres and four regional lifelong learning networks.
Before joining HEFCE, Richard worked for the Higher Education Academy in its formative years and at the University of Nottingham. At Nottingham he was director of staff development and became increasingly interested in organisational change in HE. In the 10 years before that he taught and researched human resource management in pre and post 1992 universities. Richard has published widely on HE and in 2007 he gained a PhD by published works. He is a trustee of the Society for Research into Higher Education and a member of the editorial board of HE Quarterly. His research interests focus on quality enhancement and change in HE.