Pro-Vice-Chancellor – International and member of the University Executive
Simon was appointed a Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 2014. He has been the executive lead for international partnerships since 2015 and Pro-Vice-Chancellor – International since 2018. He has worked extensively in Canada, the US, Australia and China.
Cranfield University has a long heritage of global engagement with overseas institutions and industrial partners. We were pioneers in public domain postgraduate teaching for China and, in the early 1980s, developed a comprehensive double degree programme with the premier European engineering schools. Partnering frequently with universities of technology and applied engineering and management institutes, we have developed a suite of partnership agreements that allow direct entry to our School of Management and double degree programmes for our engineering and technology master's programmes. All our Themes have bespoke research partnerships in place across the world and we have been significant contributors to the UK Newton Fund and Global Challenges Research Fund programmes, supporting capacity-building in low- and middle-income countries. Our School of Management is a member of the EMBA Consortium for Global Business Innovation, providing unique international opportunities for our management scholars and exposure to business thought leadership across the world.
Since 2015, we have pursued a purposeful internationalisation strategy. Our global ambitions encompass a set of strategic relationships with the likes of Université de Technologie Compiegne, Polytech Montpellier, UP Madrid and UP Catalunya, DIAT and VIT in India, Nanyang Technological University Singapore, RMIT Melbourne, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University and Purdue University. Simon has also been instrumental in the development of new transnational education initiatives with Muscat (2017-22) and Jiangsu Universities (2018-).
An environmental engineer (Imperial College, PhD; Cranfield University, DSc) with 160 journal publications, Simon is also a leading proponent of environmental risk management, having directed institutes for Government and the Research Councils; drafted Government guidelines on environmental risk; and championed research centres for EPSRC and NERC. His research seeks to reconcile society's unease about pollution with the responsibilities of organisations for its safe management. Beyond academe, Simon has been a member of the Government’s Interdepartmental Liaison Group on Risk Assessment; the joint engineering institutions’ Hazards Forum; BBSRC’s Beringer Panel; HMT’s Engineering and Interdependencies Expert Group; and he was an editor of Science of the Total Environment for 16 years. He is an active contributor to the Royal Academy of Engineering and editorial board member of Ingenia, its outreach magazine (2020-).
Simon was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to environmental risk management in 2020.
