Professor Pamela Gillies CBE - Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University
Professor Pamela Gillies was appointed Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University in March 2006. Since becoming the academic and chief executive head of the University, Pamela and her team have set out a new vision for Glasgow Caledonian, ensuring it will be one of the most energetic, socially enterprising, and inclusive universities in Scotland.
First in her family to attend university, Pamela graduated from Aberdeen University with a BSc in Physiology, a PGCE and a Masters in Education and Philosophy. She subsequently trained in community health at the University of Nottingham, graduating with a MMedSci and a PhD in Epidemiology. She spent six years in Sheffield evaluating health promotion initiatives before returning to Nottingham in 1984 to take up a Lectureship in Public Health Medicine, eventually rising to be appointed a Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham in 2001.
During her career, Pamela has worked in San Francisco on an Abbott Fellowship for AIDS Research (1988), in Geneva as a member of the World Health Organisation’s Global Programme on AIDS (1989-90), at Harvard University as a Harkness Fellow and Visiting Professor in Health and Human Rights (1992-3), and in London on a seconded post as the first Executive Director of Research at the Health Education Authority for England (1996-99).
In 2005, Pamela was elected as an Academician of the Academy for Social Sciences. She was elected as a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 2002, and became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Glasgow in 2007. During her career, Pamela has researched and written widely on cross-cultural perspectives on HIV/AIDS, sexuality and health, partnership responses to health improvement and community development responses to inequalities in health focussing on the potential of social action for health. She is currently active in a Gates Foundation funded research project in Kolkata, India, to prevent HIV transmission in sex workers and their families.
Amongst other roles, she has served on ESRC Committees on Evidence Based Policy and People at the Centre of Information and Communication Technologies, the Government’s Task Force on Unintended Conceptions in Young People, and the European Commission’s Working Group on HIV/AIDS, Human Rights and Discrimination. She has worked with the UK Institute of Directors and was a member of the Nuffield Institute’s Biosciences Working Group on Public Health.
Pamela is currently a member of the UUK Research Policy Committee; Universities Scotland’s Health Committee and Funding Policy Group; and the Scottish Funding Council’s Advisory Group on the Review of Teaching Funding Methodologies. Recently, Pamela was elected to the Council of CBI Scotland as the first Vice-Chancellor to hold this position.
