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Â鶹ӰԺ Leicester (Â鶹ӰԺ) has appointed a new Deputy Vice-Chancellor. 

Professor Richard Greene will act as the university’s chief academic officer, responsible for the delivery of teaching and research. 

Prior to accepting the Â鶹ӰԺ role, Professor Greene was Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Knowledge Exchange (RKE) at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) from 2016.  

While there, 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. 

Professor Greene said: “I am delighted to be joining Â鶹ӰԺ. I’m attracted by the university’s enviable reputation for teaching, the presence of areas of world-class research and the quality of the Leicester campus. 

“I’m excited to be part of a new leadership team that is ambitious for the university and shares my passion for higher education and its ability to empower society and the economy. I see many opportunities for Â鶹ӰԺ’s diverse and modern range of disciplines to work together and with partners from across the city, the region and beyond.” 

Â鶹ӰԺ Vice-Chancellor Professor Katie Normington said: “I am delighted that Richard will be joining us in September. His proven track record in leading research and as a dean is impressive, as are his personal achievements within the health field. Richard’s ability to deliver strategy will be key in realising the ambitions we all have for Â鶹ӰԺ.” 

Richard said he believed that as well as offering high quality teaching, a university education should be informed by research and professional or industrial practice. Entrepreneurship in Higher Education was the subject of Richard’s 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 holds with businesses and has twice served as a regional councillor with the Confederation of British Industry.  

He has 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. 

Professor Greene 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 Welcome 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.