Leadership Team

Professor Colin Grant
Vice Principal (International)

Colin Grant is currently Chair of the British Council Education Advisory Group. He is a Trustee of the Council for At Risk Academics (CARA). He has served on the DAAD Strategic Partnerships Committee since 2012. He was Inaugural Chair of the Russell Group International Forum until early 2019 and was Universities UK (UUK) lead for Latin America (2014-2017). He has extensive leadership experience in Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, Singapore and South Africa. He was a long-standing member of the UUK International Strategic Advisory Board until August 2019. 

Professor Grant was an exchange student in Leipzig and pursued his doctoral fieldwork at the Humboldt University and Zentralinstitut für Literaturgeschichte in Berlin in 1990. He was DAAD Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Siegen in 1996 and 1997 specialising in communication theory and society. 

Professor Grant is the author of several monographs covering literature, political science, psychology, epistemology and the theory of communication.

Twitter: @ProfColinG
LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/in/professor-colin-grant-a4538522

Professor Richard Grose
Deputy Centre Lead, Bart Cancer Institute and Professor of Cancer Cell biology
Dean for Global Engagement, Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry

Richard Grose is a group leader, Deputy Centre Lead and Professor of Cancer Cell biology at Barts Cancer Institute, where his group focuses on cell signalling both in the context of cancer development/progression and in targeted therapies/resistance. His work uses 3D models to understand cancer cell behaviour in a physiomimetic environment, focussing on breast and pancreatic cancers. He has an H-index of 31 and his work has received more than 7,500 citations. 

Alongside his position as Dean for Global Engagement within the School of Medicine and Dentistry, he is a member of the Nanchang Joint Steering Committee, Course Director for the MSc in Cancer and Molecular and Cellular Biology and Module Lead for Cancer Biology on the Queen Mary-Nanchang programme. 

Having read Zoology at the University of Bristol, he worked at Pfizer prior to undertaking a PhD in embryonic wound healing with Prof. Paul Martin at University College London. During postdoctoral research with Prof. Sabine Werner at ETH Zurich and then Prof. Clive Dickson at Cancer Research UK London Research Institute, he began to work on Receptor Tyrosine Kinase signalling in cancer, and this has been a major focus of his group at Queen Mary since 2004.

Twitter: @drrichardgrose
LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/in/richard-grose-1b4a7718

Professor Ioannis Kokkoris
Professor of Competition Law and Economics; Dean for International, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

Ioannis Kokkoris holds a Chair in Competition Law and Economics at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies, Queen Mary University of London, UK. He is also the Dean for International for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Professor Kokkoris is an expert on competition law and economics. His main research interests span all areas of competition law and policy including comparative competition law/economics and policy focusing on EU, US, BRICS and ASEAN. Professor Kokkoris has formerly served at the UK Competition and Markets Authority, DG Competition, European Commission and US Federal Trade Commission.

Professor Kokkoris has more than 100 publications including more than 15 authored/co-authored books, more than 65 articles and 20 chapters in edited volumes. Professor Kokkoris is on the editorial board of various international journals, frequently speaks at conferences globally and is regularly interviewed by international media.

Professor Parvati Nair
Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary University of London, Senior Adviser on the Queen Mary Global Policy Institute’s Resilience Futures India Initiative

Professor Parvati Nair has held a Chair in Hispanic, Cultural and Migration Studies at Queen Mary since 2007. She joined the university in 2000 as Lecturer in Spanish. Between 2012 and 2019, she was seconded to the United Nations University, where she worked as Director of the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility in Barcelona, Spain and 2017 Working Level Chair of the Global Migration Group of the United Nations, coordinating inter-agency work on the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.

Prior to her secondment to the United Nations University, she was Director of Queen Mary’s Centre for the Study of Migration (2009-2012), where she led projects with Tower Hamlets, local community organisations in London’s East End and collaborated with Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry on projects on health care and clinical cultures for BAME communities.

Her writing focuses on the nexus of migration and culture, combining analyses of visual and other representations of migration and displacement with ethnography to consider questions of rights, representation, cultural memory and transnational identities. She has published widely in these fields. Her last book, A Different Light (2011, Duke University Press) was on mass global displacements as represented through the work of the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. She is the Founding and Principal Editor of Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture and is currently writing on a book on displacement in the Mediterranean.

Twitter: @P4rv4t1N41r
LinkedIn: uk.linkedin.com/in/parvati-nair-46843613

Giuliano Russo
Lecturer in Global Health, Queen Mary Centre for Primary Care and Public Health

Giuliano has over 20 years of professional experience in academia and the public and private sector, having worked in the past for Oxford Policy Management, the University of Lisbon (Portugal), the World Bank, the Overseas Development Institute, the Government of Mozambique, the Instituto Nacional de Salud Publica (Mexico), as well as for SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals in Spain and the UK.

A health economist by training, his recent work has focused on pharmaceutical markets in low- and middle-income countries, the economics of human resources for health, health systems in low-income settings, and on global health aid architecture, with a geographical focus on African and Latin-American countries. Giuliano is currently Principal Investigator for an MRC-Newton Fund project in Brazil, and Co-Investigator for a UKRI project on the effect of coronavirus lockdown measures in Africa.

LinkedIn: pt.linkedin.com/in/giuliano-russo-263bbaa

Dr Stella Ladi
Reader at Queen Mary University of London and Associate Professor at Panteion University, Athens

Stella is research fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) and Research Associate at the Hellenic Observatory, LSE. She previously worked as a lecturer at University of Sheffield and University of Exeter and has also been a Research Fellow at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI). She has acted as a public policy expert at the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Aegean, Greece.

She has extended experience working with policy makers in national and international organisations such as the FCO, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission and IOM. In July 2002 she completed her PhD thesis at the University of York. Her research interests include crisis management, the Eurozone crisis, public policy and public administration reforms, Europeanization, global public policy and transnational administration and the role of experts in public policy.

She has published in journals such as Journal of European Integration, JCMS, Policy & Society, Regulation & Governance, Public Administration, West European Politics, New Political Economy, Comparative European Politics and Political Studies Review.  She is the co-author of Capitalising on Constraint: Bailout Politics in Eurozone Countries, Manchester: Manchester University Press (in press) with Moury, C., Cardoso, D. and Gago, A.

Twitter: @stella_ladi
LinkedIn: gr.linkedin.com/in/stella-ladi-02a52527

 

Dr Sarah Wolff
Director of the Centre for European Research, Reader in European Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London, Director of the Queen Mary Master in International Relations at the University of London Institute in Paris and Principal Investigator for the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence NEXTEUK project on the future of EU-UK Relations

Sarah is a leading scholar on European integration, public policy and international relations. Her research has focused on EU-UK relations, EU and UK migration and border policies, EU-Islam and EU-Middle East and North Africa. Her leadership combines excellence academic and policy-making skills as before joining academia, Dr Wolff worked at the European Commission and the European Parliament. She has also experience with think tanks and is a Senior Research Associate at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (Clingendael). She is Visiting Professor at the College of Europe.

She co-edited one of the first special issues in the field on EU responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic for the Journal of European Integration. She is Editor of the journal Mediterranean Politics. Her acclaimed book Secular Power Europe and Islam: Identity and Foreign Policy is the result of data collected through a Fulbright-Schuman and a Leverhulme research grant. Her monograph The Mediterranean Dimension of the European Union's Internal Security was one of the first comprehensive studies exploring the externalisation of EU Justice and Home Affairs policy to North Africa and the Middle East. She received the LISBOA Research Award 2012 for her book Freedom, Security and Justice after Lisbon and Stockholm.

Twitter: @drsarahwolff
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-wolff-64153832/

Staff team

Rachel Miles
Executive Officer (International)

Rachel joined Queen Mary University of London in November 2021 and works closely with Professor Colin Grant, Queen Mary's Vice Principal (International). She has more than 10 years’ experience in the research and higher education sector working across international programmes and consortia.

At the UK Collaborative on Development Research (UKCDR), Rachel led international projects on Covid-19, equitable partnerships and sustainable housing. At the Wellcome Trust she worked with the Population Health Department to project manage funding programmes and partnerships including the African Population Cohorts Consortium, and at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Rachel was responsible for managing a diverse portfolio of research grants and programmes across clinical, epidemiological, epidemic and policy research.

Mark Coddington
Global Projects and Policy Manager

Mark has been working in the International Higher Education sector for 15 years. He joined the International Office in Newcastle University in 2005 supporting the agent network and leading on engagement with sponsors and embassies. In 2010 he took a sabbatical for 18 months working for an NGO, Himalayan Education Lifeline Programme, teaching in Ladakh, India and Changu Narayan, Nepal. On his return to the UK he took up a position with the University of East London focusing on growing recruitment in South Asia. In 2014 he joined SOAS University of London as Regional Manager for South Asia overseeing recruitment and engagement. In 2019 he took a brief departure from Higher Education working for the Home Office as a Senior Trade Policy Advisor with responsibility for representing the department’s interest across Whitehall in the wider trade agenda, before joining  Queen Mary in February 2020 to support the Global Engagement Office in coordinating and delivering international projects, policy initiatives and partnerships.

Pete Biggs
International Communications Manager

Pete works with the International Office and the Global Engagement Office to raise the international public profile of Queen Mary and communicate the university's world-class research, global partnerships, joint programmes, student and alumni success and incredible diversity to new audiences around the world.

He was previously at Reuters, where he led communications and PR activity for Europe, the Middle East and Africa: the news agency’s largest and busiest region. During his time with the news organisation he expanded the geographical reach of the role and used his extensive global media experience to build new relationships and generate positive media coverage around the world, helping to develop new markets for the agency. Before this he was part of the Corporate Affairs team at parent company Thomson Reuters.

Pete read Languages and Linguistics at the University of York before completing a professional qualification in marketing and is a former Council member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. He speaks fluent English and basic Italian and is trying to get better at the latter.