The Principal and CEO of Doctoral College is Professor Dr. Stanley Oliver

 

Professor Oliver has over 20 years of senior management experience in global higher education including roles as a Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor, Executive Dean, Director of School, Head of Department, and Head of Research Institute. Professor Oliver has also experience, knowledge, and skills, as a Quality Assurance Reviewer for the UK Government Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) for Higher Education and as a Quality Assurance Verifier for the Office of Qualifications and Examinations Regulation (Ofqual). In addition to this Professor Oliver has a strong international profile and a large network of international colleagues worldwide.

 

However, before he moved into academia Professor Oliver had nearly 20 years of experience working in the automotive industry with a career starting in the apprentice school at Dunlop International Group and through successful studying, at college and university he progressed into design and development; then into manufacturing which led to involvement in operations management, information management, plant management, procurement and supply chain management. At this time Dunlop International Group supplied most of the rubber components to the Automotive Sector worldwide. This enabled his career to develop through involvement with various projects withing the UK sites of the Dunlop International Group. These projects varied but regularly comprised working on many different automotive supply chain initiatives which included being seconded to the client partner. Leading to participating in projects with British Leyland, Rover, MG, Jaguar etc in the UK; Ford, GM and Chrysler etc in the USA; Mercedes/Daimler, VW/Audi and BMW etc in Germany; plus Volvo in Sweden; Fiat in Italy, Maruti/Suzuki and Tata in India and Proton in Malaysia. This period of industrial experience greatly influenced his experience with business performance, leadership and the management of change.

 

Professor Oliver came into Academia at the same time Nissan decided to build their European manufacturing facility in the North-East of England. The next 17 years committed him to working with Nissan, the North-East Development Agency and DTI London plus many global automotive suppliers. This involvement had a strong focus towards establishing a continuous improvement culture between the UK automotive sector, UK Higher Education and the UK global automotive supply chain. As well as this he has written a number of worldwide case studies, books-chapters and over 100 journal articles. He is now an established international scholar with experience involving two back-to-back large EPSRC research council grants each worth over £1,000,000, followed by enterprise grants with the European Union with a value of over £5,000,000, and in addition to this he has successfully supervised large research teams which has resulted in over 50 doctoral graduations. His current research focus is in leadership, academic staff development, employee engagement, andragogy, heutagogy and pedagogy of learning including research rich teaching, inquiry-based learning with technology enhanced enablement.​