The EDI Network

Charles Stafford is a social anthropologist who has carried out extensive field research in Taiwan, China and the USA; he specialises in the anthropology of learning and cognition. He is Professor at the London School of Economics and also Vice Chair of the Appointments Committee (VCAC). In the VCAC role, he has a special responsibility for work related to the School's EDI strategies and initiatives, especially those related to academic hiring, career development and promotion.

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Claire is Professor of Politics and Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor for Equalities and Diversity at the University of Sussex. Her research on gender, politics and policy has been awarded the 2011 Richard Rose Prize by the Political Studies Association, the 2011 Carrie Chapman Catt Prize by Iowa State University and the 2012 Public Policy Section Prize by the American Political Science Association. Her most recent book 'Cabinets, Ministers and Gender' (2019, Oxford University Press) explains why women have historically been underrepresented in cabinet in seven democracies, and why this is changing.

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I am Professor of Mental Health & Inclusivity in the Division of Psychology & Mental Health, School of Health Sciences, at the University of Manchester. My research and related activities emanate from a passion to tackle inequalities in all areas, especially in health and education. I lead a team of service users, community members, healthcare professionals and academics who are undertaking research to reduce disparities in access, care and outcomes for under-served communities. Currently, our focus is on developing culturally-appropriate psychosocial interventions - specifically ‘talking treatments’ with people of Sub-Saharan African and Caribbean backgrounds affected by psychoses. I am also the University of Manchester’s first Academic Lead for Equality Diversity & Inclusion. I now job-share this role with Dr Rachel Cowen. My particular focus is on providing academic leadership, direction, advice and support to colleagues involved in the delivery of Equality Objectives across Faculties, Schools & Professional Support Services (PSS) to drive Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (ED&I) and to deliver our Race Equality Chartermark Action Plan.

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I am a social epidemiologist, my research has focussed on ethnic and social inequalities in diabetes and heart disease. I completed my PhD in UCL in the Dept of Epidemiology and Public Health and moved to Imperial (via Monash, Melbourne) to work on the SABRE study examining ethnic differences in diabetes. I joined Surrey in 2017, and my work has more recently concentrated on ethnic inequalities within HE.

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Hannah has been Associate Pro-Vice Chancellor for Diversity & Inclusion at Aston since 2019. She oversees Athena SWAN across the institution and is actively supporting Aston’s first Race Equality Charter submission. She led Aston’s successful silver Athena SWAN submission in 2018. Hannah co-founded inspiring Women at Aston and leads a range of working groups tackling issue around the pay gap, inclusive recruitment, supporting disabled staff and students, supporting Black staff and students, and decolonising the curriculum. She currently Chairs Aston’s Diversity & Inclusion committee. Experienced at writing and reviewing Charter applications and action plans, Hannah often supports other institutions in their equality Charter activities. In 2019, Hannah developed Aston’s first diversity and inclusion strategy, Inclusive Aston, which provided a clear framework for Astons’ commitment to continual review of diversity and inclusion issues, alongside impactful interventions, and measurable outputs. Hannah leads two British Council funded projects that aim to support universities in India and Brazil in developing their own gender equality frameworks. She is also a member of the Strengthening Leadership with Gender, Equity and Inclusivity in HEIs in the Greater Mekong Subregion and Timor-Leste project, which is jointly run by the British Council and SEAMEO RIHED. Hannah is a Principal Fellow of Advance HE and sits on the Advance HE Strategic Advisory Group for EDI. She is an experienced clinical teacher and researcher. Her research focus is on developing clinical and educational interventions that enhance the lives of people living with ocular disease and visual impairment.

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Professor Solanke is the Chair of European Union Law and Social Justice within the University of Leeds Law School. She is a former Visiting Professor at the Harvard University School of Public Health and Fernand Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute. She is the author of ‘EU Law’ (Pearson 2015), ‘Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law’ (Routledge 2011) and ‘Discrimination as Stigma - A Theory of Anti-Discrimination Law’ (Hart 2017) as well as many articles in peer reviewed journals. Professor Solanke is an Academic Bencher of the Inner Temple and founder of the Black Female Professors Forum, which promotes the visibility and progress of Black women in academia. She recently chaired the Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL and is currently PI on a £2.5 million UKRI funded project looking at the impact of two viruses - COVID 19 and discrimination - on practices of wellbeing and resilience in BAME families and communities in the UK. In April 2021 she was appointed inaugural Dean for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Leeds.

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Dr Jessica Jones Nielsen is the Assistant Vice President (Equality, Diversity & Inclusions - Race Equality) at City, University of London. She is also the academic lead for the Race Equality Charter group at City and provides academic leadership, direction and support to colleagues involved in the delivery of racial justice initiatives. Jessica has a background in community-based participatory research and examines the intersections between health and mental health. Through her research, Jessica is passionate about promoting engagement in positive health behaviours and resilience with particular emphasis on the health and well-being of racial and ethnic minority community groups. Jessica is a trained and registered counselling psychologist, and has a clear focus of driving equality, diversity and inclusion across a range of sectors and organisations.

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I am Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor (Equality) and Professor of Organisation Studies at the University of Birmingham. Central to my research is an interest in the concept of career. Over the last twenty years I have developed research examining the impact of gender, ethnicity, social class and age on careers in a variety of contexts including defence, professional service organisations and the police in the UK. I co-direct the Work Inclusivity Research Centre at Birmingham with Dr Holly Birkett.

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Professor Judith Rankin is Dean of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Newcastle University and professor of maternal and child health within the Institute of Health & Society. Judith first became involved with the Athena SWAN charter in 2009 as part of Newcastle University’s application for a bronze award and led the first Newcastle University’s Athena SWAN unit application for the Institute of Health & Society achieving a silver award in 2011. Since then, she has supported a number of unit level applications across STEM, and more recently arts, humanities and social science, subjects as well as the University’s bronze renewal in 2012 and the University’s successful silver application in 2015. She led the IHS Athena SWAN team form 2010-15 and has been a member of the University’s self-assessment team (SAT) since 2009. She has acted as an Athena SWAN panel member and chair on a number of occasions as well as advising other Universities on their applications. She took up the position of Dean of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at Newcastle University in 2015 to provide strategic leadership to the EDI agenda at Newcastle which involves broadening the agenda to take an intersectional approach. Judith chairs the University’s EDI Committee and University Athena SWAN SAT and is a member of the University's newly created Race Equality Charter SAT. Judith began her academic career with a BSc (Hons) in Physiology and a PhD in Teratology from Edinburgh University. She moved to Newcastle University as a research associate and progressed to a personal chair over 15 years. She held an National Institute of Health Research Public Health Career Scientist award and holds a Faculty of Public Health fellowship through distinction since 2012. Judith leads research programmes on congenital anomalies, reproductive loss and risk factors in pregnancy. She is an elected member of the European Surveillance of Congenital Anomalies (EUROCAT) Management Committee and an invited member of Public Health England’s National Congenital Anomaly and Rare Disease Registration Service (NCARDRS) External Scientific Committee. She has authored over 200 papers and been awarded funding from regional, national and international funders. She has three children and worked part-time when they were young.

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Professor Katherine Linehan leads the strategy and support for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Nottingham, and sits on the University Executive Board, with responsibility for driving EDI and people-orientated policy and initiatives across the University.  She is also a Professor of Anatomical Education and is a member of the Anatomical Society. In her role as Pro-Vice Chancellor, Katherine champions equality of opportunity, support and recognition for staff and students with protected characteristics and leads actions to deliver on the University’s EDI and People Strategic Delivery Plans to ensure all policies and practices are transparent, fair and inclusive. 

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Louise Bryant is a Professor in Psychological and Social Medicine, and with Professor Iyiola Solanke, an inaugural Dean for EDI at the University of Leeds. She has held leadership roles in relation to Athena Swan and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion since 2012. Louise continues to raise the profile of equality, diversity and inclusion through all her activities, including research that challenges health inequalities experienced by people with a learning disability.

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Mark has held a number of academic posts since 1994 in a range of institution in the UK and Australia. In his current role at NTU, he is the Institutional Lead on Athena SWAN and Chair of the NTU ISAT.

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Marion Walker is Professor of Stroke Rehabilitation at the University of Nottingham. She is an occupational therapist by professional background and has played a leading role in developing a research culture within her own profession. She has served as Chair of UK Stroke Forum, President of UK Society for Rehabilitation Research, Associate Director for Rehabilitation of the UK Stroke Research Network (2005-2015) and Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at the University of Nottingham 2015-2018. Marion was a Trustee of the UK Stroke Association 2009-2019. Marion has a strong research portfolio covering a wide area of local, national and international research projects. She is a strong advocate of patient partnership and has co-chaired the Nottingham Stroke Research Partnership Group for 10 years. She is an Emeritus NIHR Senior Investigator and was awarded an MBE in the Queens New Year Honours list 2012 for her service to stroke rehabilitation and stroke survivors. Marion is an international advisor for stroke and stroke rehabilitation research in Sweden, Norway and Australia and holds honorary professorial positions at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Queensland.

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Nona McDuff is the Pro Vice-Chancellor, Students and Teaching at Solent University. She was awarded an OBE for her services to diversity in higher education and is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She has served as a panel member of the Teaching Excellence Framework as the widening participation expert and was part of the ministerial Social Mobility Advisory Group convened to widen access and improve success for disadvantaged and under-represented groups. As the chair of the Higher Education Race Action Group (HERAG) with over 400 members, Nona was invited to address the All Party Parliamentary Group on Higher Education on diversity in academia where she challenged the ministers to take active steps to promote social justice through education. Nona’s research interests include inclusive curricula and differential attainment.

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Professor Rebecca Surender was appointed Oxford’s first Advocate and Pro Vice-Chancellor for Equality and Diversity in 2015. The role provides leadership and coordination of all equality and diversity work across the collegiate university for all its staff and students. Rebecca is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Dept of Social Policy and Intervention where she supervises doctoral students and undertakes research in health and social policy in developing countries. Her main focus concerns the politics, implementation and outcomes of health and income maintenance policies in South Africa. She has worked as a consultant and advisor for several multilateral and government agencies including the World Bank, UNRISD, UK DfID and SA DSD and she is currently a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Rhodes University, South Africa. She is a Fellow and Deputy Principal of Green Templeton College.

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I am a Professor at University College London (UCL) and Head of Section for Inborn Errors of Metabolism, UCL GOS Institute for Child Health, with a research interest in Batten disease. I am also UCL Provost’s Envoy for Gender Equality. I have used the Athena SWAN (AS) Charter to further gender equality in the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology, being awarded the first Silver (2009) and first Gold (2016) awards at UCL. I work with UCL’s Athena SWAN manager to support departments and colleagues in their gender equality work and AS applications, including both the LMCB and Great Ormond Street Institute for Child Health (GOS ICH) in achieving the first Gold awards at UCL (2020) under the revised broader Athena SWAN Charter.  UCL currently has an institutional silver award and 39 academic departments holding AS awards. As Envoy I chair the Gender Working Group with 2 co-chairs to model diversity. We work with and challenge senior management and the whole institution to advance and deliver UCL’s gender equality priorities, connecting with other Equality Working Groups and Networks. I share my expertise with UK Universities and UCL’s international partners and beyond. In my role on the Athena SWAN Governance Committee I am helping to improve the effective operation and strategic development of the charter, so that it continues to further gender equality in the UK HE sector, and internationally.

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Professor Sarah Barrow is Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Arts and Humanities and Executive Team Lead for Equality and Diversity as well as for Employability at the University of East Anglia. Sarah has experience of leading strategic cultural projects and events, including collaborations between artists, media-makers and young people. She is currently a Board Member of the National Centre for Writing, Threshold Studios and Norwich Forum Trust. Sarah is also Professor of Film and Media and her research is broadly concerned with cinema, politics and cultural policy in Latin America, with a specialism in Peru.

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Professor Sarah Vickerstaff BSc, PhD is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Her main research interests are in the changes to the relationship between paid work and the life course. She is an internationally recognised researcher into paid work in later life. In the last 15 years her research on older workers and retirement has been funded by research councils, charities and the UK Government. In addition to her academic record she has significant managerial and wider HE sector experience. She was Head of the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at Kent 2012-2016. She is currently the University of Kent lead for Athena SWAN. She was a member of the Strategic Advisory Network of the ESRC and undertakes considerable grant panel work for UKRI and overseas grant awarding bodies.

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I am Dean of the UCL Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, and Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science in the Institute of Advanced Studies at UCL. Before UCL, I was Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Essex, and before that I was Director of the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, Assistant Dean for Research in the School of Social and Historical Sciences and Head of the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck Prior to that I was Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies and founding Director of the Centre for Interdisiplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds.

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Sheila Gupta began her career in Local Government at a time of major policy changes including Compulsory Competitive Tendering and Local Management of Schools, providing her with firsthand experience of managing complex change. She assumed her first role in Higher Education (HE) in 1990 and has subsequently worked in institutions spanning pre and post 92s, specialist institutions and the Russell Group, either as Director of Human Resources or equivalent. Sheila joined Queen Mary University London in January 2020 as its first Vice-Principal for People, Culture and Inclusion. She has a remit for staff, students and alumni in relation to equality, diversity and inclusion. Before joining Queen Mary, Sheila was Director of Human Resources at the University of Sussex, where she was also a member of the University Executive Group; prior to which she was at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. She has been invited to speak at
 Conferences in the UK, Europe and the US, on topics relating to good governance, race equality, talent management, embedding equality and diversity into leadership development programmes and advancing gender equality. Sheila is also a former Chair of the Russell Group HR Directors Forum and Universities HR, the professional body for HR professionals in HE. In 2006, she received an MBE for services to Higher Education and became a Leadership Foundation Fellow for Higher Education. She also served as an Independent Member of the Education Honours Committee for six years.

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I've had a career in higher education for 35 years, as an academic in civil engineering and more recently mathematics. I've been at the University of Reading since 2003 as a professor of applied mathematics, as head of the mathematics and statistics department, as head of the larger School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences, and, since 2015, as Dean for Diversity and Inclusion in a job share with Professor Ellie Highwood, in particular leading on our work on disability and on LGBT+ (taking us into the Stonewall Top 100 Employers), and co-leading on our gender and Athena SWAN work.

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I am the Deputy Provost at Durham University and Professor of Child Abuse and Neglect in the Department of Sociology. As the Deputy Provost, my remit includes EDI, recruitment, progression and promotion of academic staff, academic strategy and planning planning across the University. I am a member of the Provost Board and I chair Durham University's Safeguarding Operations Group. My research relates largely to child maltreatment in its various forms and to professional responses designed to safeguard children’s welfare. I am a member of the Advisory Board of the National Centre of Expertise in Child Sexual Abuse, funded by the Home Office and led by Barnardo's. Recent funded research projects include an evaluation of the Durham Child Advocacy Centre approach to child sexual abuse, funded by Durham Constabulary and the Home Office. Outside the University, I am involved in a range of activities relating to my areas of specialism. I am a member of the Executive Board of ATSA (www.atsa.com) and the Board of Directors of NOTA (www.nota.co.uk), two of the largest professional associations globally concerned with protecting children through improving responses to people who have displayed harmful sexual behaviours. I am Expert Adviser for the NICE Centre for Guidelines. I was member of the ESRC's Grant Assessment Panel 'B' (until 2015) and was previously research advisor to CAFCASS, the Children's Workforce Development Council (CWDC) and Special Advisor to the Department of Health/ NIMHE Violence and Victims of Violence and Abuse Prevention Programme. Between 2014 and 2018 I was Non-Executive Director of Doncaster Children’s Trust. I am an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

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Stephen Curry is a Professor of Structural Biology at Imperial College London where he also serves as the Assistant Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. For many years he has been a writer and campaigner on a range of scientific issues including open access, research assessment, research funding and science policy. He is currently chair of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).

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Susan Bruce is Professor of English Literature at Keele, Institutional Lead for Gender Equality, and co-Chair of Keele’s EDI steering group. She has twice served as Head of Keele’s School of Humanities. She is a feminist critic, and has written on a range of topics, from early-modern drama, through memory and photography in inter-war literature, TV medical drama and the NHS to, most recently, Utopia and Brexit. She is a former Chair of University English, the subject association for English, and co-Chair of the Arts and Humanities Alliance (http://artsandhums.org/), an umbrella group of around 50 a&h learned societies and subject associations.

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Uduak Archibong PhD MBE is Professor of Diversity at the University of Bradford, UK, where she directs the Centre for Inclusion and Diversity and provides strategic oversight for equality and diversity across the institution. She is Fellow of the West African College of Nursing and Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing. Her research, teaching, and knowledge transfer activities broadly cover the areas of workforce diversity, diversity competent leadership development, family-centred health care and cross-cultural negotiation of community/family access to, and engagement in health and social services. Her research interests have been influenced by many years' experience of working closely with leaders and senior managers within the healthcare and higher education arenas both in the UK and internationally. She has recently led to completion a major multi-million European Commission funded action research project, GENOVATE, across 7 European Universities and is currently involved in a multi-million Horizon 2020 project, RRING, along with 22 international partners in Europe, China, Africa, India, Japan, North America and South America. She is also involved in a national research study ‘Cracking the Concrete Ceiling’ which seeks to explore the impact of the ‘Diversifying Leadership’ programme of the Leadership Foundation [now part of Advance HE] on UK Black and Minority Ethnic Academic staff. This study is in collaboration with Royal Holloway, University of London, the University of East London and the Equality Challenge Unit [now part of Advance HE]. She is the Guest Editor of a recently published Special Issue of the Journal of Psychological Issues in Organisational Culture entitled 'Reframing Diversity Interventions in Austere Times'.

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Professor Zoe Radnor is Vice President (Strategy and Planning; Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) at City, University of London where she leads on not only the University’s Strategy and Planning processes but also the Equality and Diversity agenda. She is also Professor of Service Operations Management at Cass Business School. Zoe’s research interest is in performance and process improvement and service management within public sector organisations. She has led research projects for a number of Government and healthcare organisations, evaluating the use of ‘lean’ and associated techniques and continues to maintain a strong ongoing research profile. Zoe is a Fellow of the British Academy of Management (FBAM) and the Academy of Social Science (FAcSS). She has published over 100 articles, papers, chapters and reports and has presented widely, nationally and internationally, to academic, governmental and practitioner audiences.

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