Professor Richard Greene

Deputy Vice-Chancellor

Professor Richard Greene joined De Montfort University as Deputy Vice-Chancellor in September 2022. As sole Deputy Vice-Chancellor, Richard acts as the University’s Chief Academic Officer with responsibilities across teaching, research, academic planning and resource allocation.

Prior to joining DMU, Richard spent six years as Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange (RKE) at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) where he developed and implemented a highly successful strategy that saw the university rise 15 places for both research quality and research power - a performance that Times Higher Education described as one of the biggest success stories of the Research Excellence Framework 2021.

Richard has had a long-term interest in entrepreneurship in higher education, it was the subject of his MBA dissertation and he was part of the Universities UK and Research England group that wrote the Knowledge Exchange Concordat. He steered MMU to second in the UK for the number of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships it held with businesses and twice served as a regional councillor with the Confederation of British Industry.

Whilst at MMU, Richard also developed a number of larger-scale external partnerships to support research and provide opportunities for students, most recently with GCHQ and with the Rugby League World Cup.

Richard grew up in North Yorkshire before moving to London in the mid-1980s to study medicine and gain a PhD. After completing house jobs in 1991, he held Wellcome Trust and Medical Research Council fellowships in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Oxford, where he developed his interest in the neurobiological basis of mental illness and the functional neuroanatomy of the brain circuits subserving learning and memory processes.

After a short time as Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Sheffield, he moved to the University of Bristol where he combined membership of the Medical Research Council Centre for Synaptic Plasticity with leadership of the second year of the medical degree programme and responsibility for anatomy and neuroscience teaching. He was founding co-director of the Applied and Integrated Medical Sciences Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and, while on secondment to the Royal College of Surgeons of England, created the national Scientific Basis of Surgical Practice Course.

Richard was appointed as Chair of Anatomy and Head of Department at University College Cork in 2008 before returning to the UK in 2010 to become Dean of the Faculty of Life Sciences at the University of Bradford, where he also held many university-wide and external roles. He is particularly proud of creating the Integrated Life Sciences Learning Centre - a world-leading collection of physical and digital learning resources spanning allied health professions, bioscience and archaeology, and his role in the Building STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) at Bradford widening participation project.

You can contact Professor Richard Greene directly by emailing jrt.greene@dmu.ac.uk or through his PA by emailing Eileen Waldron ewaldron@dmu.ac.uk