Most Recent Senior Role

Whilst at the University of the Sunshine Coast I was Dean Academic, and at times acted as the DVCA, reporting to the Vice Chancellor and President. I led 500 academic staff with a total income of $220M and a budget of $86M. 

As a key academic member of the senior leadership team my role ensured the effective management of financial, human and physical resources across the academic portfolio and to identify opportunities for growth and engagement that aligned with the strategic objectives of the university. I had responsibility for enhancing academic quality and standards and developing and maintaining strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders. These broad responsibilities meant that I provided leadership and direction to:

• Student load planning

• Resource planning

• Workforce planning; recruitment, workloads and promotion

• Development and updating of relevant policies and procedures

• Development of new offerings

• Implementation of relevant parts of the strategic plan 

The following provides a summary of my achievements over my five year tenure.

Strategic leadership of changes to the governance of Learning & Teaching to simplify and devolve the governance of learning and teaching. I established the team to define clear roles, responsibilities and the constitutions of school learning and teaching committees, clarity around the expectations of academic staff in their duties with regards to curriculum and streamlining the workflow for approval of changes to and development of new academic offerings. Finally, I defined a range of training that will be provided to underpin the implementation of the revised operating paradigm.

Strategic leadership of plans to grow student enrolments focussing on the three key areas of international students, revitalised offerings and Online Programme Management (OPM) partners to drive the growth of student numbers. 

Through my leadership, UniSC engineering programmes were re-modelled to facilitate expansion through five new masters programmes and a dual award with TAFE Queensland to deliver a novel offering in aircraft maintenance, both aimed at international students. I procured an OPM partner to support this development to provide the necessary expertise, and support to expedite the development and provide greater reach domestically and meet enrollment objectives. 

Established a novel student project by leveraging my engagement with industry partners, UniSC is collaboratively developing a novel multidisciplinary electric vertical take off and landing student project to support the creation of a robust and dynamic curriculum that prepares our graduates to be leaders in their respective engineering disciplines.

Established an activity based costing model to analyse surpluses achieved by courses, study components and programmes. This allowed schools to review their operations and limit delivery hours where appropriate and will be used to rationalise delivery during a broader project that will re-develop the curriculum.  

Strategic leadership of the redevelopment of all curriculum to maintain and grow the student market share by ensuring university programmes increase efficiency and remain competitive and responsive to changing industry and student needs. Focus was on the rationalisation of underperforming courses and programmes and the programmatic design of the curriculum to deliver; high quality graduate outcomes, micro-credentialing, expanded postgraduate study options, embedding of industry credentials, enhanced student employability through sub-degree awards with multiple entry and exit points across all schools in UniSC. 

Chair of the Programmes and Courses Committee with responsibility for all curriculum quality assurance at UniSC, reporting to the academic board. Instigated training of the committee to ensure consistent knowledge of curriculum design, accreditation requirements, AQF and HES. Realigned the approval workflow to streamline documentation presented for internal accreditation. 

Established the UniSC micro-credential framework system and team to implement micro-credentials across the university and developed the UniSC plan to expand micro-credential offerings. 

Implemented the University response to the Department of Education, Skills and Employment’s (DESE) National Priorities and Industry Linkage Fund (NPILF) initiative consisting of the cross-institutional plan, the submission to and communication with DESE and reporting to the Vice Chancellor and DESE on its implementation. The plan had three strands that focused on the implementation of a coherent work integrated learning strategy, expansion of short courses available to industry to facilitate upskilling and finally raising the aspirations of school students to enter university.

Established a new work integrated framework to standardise, streamline and scaffold work integrated learning requirements of all UniSC programmes. 

Established a new strategic institutional approach to industry engagement that implemented a new framework, website, coherent university wide increase in industry engagement and the establishment of a team to provide front-facing interactions with industry for the university, and led the unit during its establishment phase.

Implemented a realignment and rationalisation of the academic portfolio that delivered increased efficiency through a reduction of over 100 courses, 35 study components and 10 programmes all with low enrolments from both the 2021 and 2022 curriculum, whilst increasing enrolments by 10% in 2021. 

Developed and implemented a new academic workload management system to transparently and consistently record workloads, in line with the Enterprise Agreement (2019-2022) to ensure equity and efficiency across all schools. This was trialled in 2020, implemented in 2021 and is now the standardised tool used in UniSC.

Established new academic performance standards that define learning and teaching, research and engagement expectations for academic staff.

Established UniSC Online to respond to students, increase efficiency of delivery, support the combination of student cohorts at smaller more remote campuses and to broaden the reach of UniSC. This resulted in 10% of all UniSC students enrolling through a range of new online programmes at inception in 2021, with the study mode being the fastest growing in 2022, 2023 & 2024. 

Strategic leadership and implementation of measures to ensure continuity of delivery to studying students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Managed the transition of all courses and programmes to online delivery over a one week period, overseeing the delivery of staff training, IT support to staff and students, monitoring of success and communication with external media. Finally I also managed the transition back to campus and the ongoing responses to temporary lock-downs.

Implemented a standardised quinquennial curriculum review cycle and annual programme monitoring to better undertake quality assurance of UniSC offerings. For both I developed the review system and defined the monitoring statistics used by academic staff.

Established a collaboration with TAFE Queensland that has led to enhanced articulations with defined progression routes in addition to developing dual awards in advanced manufacturing and aircraft maintenance engineering in response to industry demand. 

Implemented a collaboration with Comlink Australia a local in-home care provider to expand UniSC placement opportunities for students and provide co-location opportunities for Comlink.

Established a partnership with the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads to financially support the recruitment of a new professor of sustainable transportation, develop mutual research opportunities and support student placements and engineering honours projects. 

Implemented a series of short courses in advanced manufacturing for industry that guide attendees through the design and manufacture of a component. In collaboration with the Sunshine Coast Manufacturing Excellence Forum and TAFE Queensland.

Engineering Research that I have undertaken recently has focussed around the utilisation of waste to generate energy. Working with collaborators from Deakin and Federation Universities and a SME, I led a review of the challenges associated with utilising bottom ash from waste to energy plants. 

International Recognition consists of my work on international review committees. I was invited to serve as a member of the Engineering Panel (Joint Research Schemes) in 2019 for the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, with my role being  extended twice. In this role I review submitted engineering research proposals and make recommendations for funding. I also served as a expert member of the Steel Technical Groups (TGA2 Downstream Steel Processing) for the EU Commission Research Fund for Coal and Steel over the period 2011 to 2022 with responsibility for monitoring ongoing EU downstream steel processing research, in particular monitoring and control projects, assigned as part of a multi-disciplinary team of experts. Since 2006 I have acted as an expert for the EU Commission, reviewing engineering research proposals submitted to the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and a range of other European research funding rounds.