Vice-Chancellor's Advisory Group
Professor John Latham CBE
Vice-Chancellor and CEO
John is Vice-Chancellor and CEO of the Coventry University Group.
He is a double graduate of the University and has a background in information technology and telecommunications. Previously he worked for a number of private sector organisations including JHP Group, Jaguar Cars and BT (which - included a period as a sponsored Research Fellow). In 2015, John was awarded an Honorary Lifetime Fellowship of the British Computer Society for his services to the IT industry. John remains active in the IT space, currently as an advisor to TechnologyOne an Australian based software provider and also Chair of the Universities UK/JISC Software Negotiations & Strategy Group.
John has throughout his career held high-profile roles at regional, national and European levels promoting innovation, technology and economic development. Including spending periods of time working in in France, Spain, Portugal and Germany and being a long-term advisor to the European Commission.
Additionally, John has held several Ministerial appointments in the UK and overseas. Currently he is a Non-Executive Board Member for the Department of Business and Trade in the UK, a Non-Executive Director for Qualification Wales an arms-length body of the Welsh Government, a Non-Executive Director for the NHS England Workforce Training and Education Committee. An Advisory Panel Member for the Home Team Academy of Singapore and most recently he was appointed as an Independent Panel Member on the Advisory Assessment Panel for the Recruitment of members to NHS Bodies.
Additionally, John is a Director of the University Alliance mission group of universities, and a Member for the Integrated Care Partnership (ICP) for the Coventry and Warwickshire Integrated Care System.
Finally, John is an Extraordinary Professor in the area of enterprise and entrepreneurship at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, where in 2019 he additionally received an Honorary Doctorate for his services to UK Higher Education. In the same year he was recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours with a CBE for his Services to Higher Education.
Professor Andy Palmer CMG
Founder and CEO Palmer Automotive Ltd., VC & CEO SWITCH Mobility Ltd. and VC Inobat j.s.a.
Dr Andy Palmer, CMG, is recently appointed VC & CEO of SWITCH Mobility Ltd, extending his long relationship with Ashok Leyland. He was until May 2020, the Group Chief Executive Officer of Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd. He joined the business 2014 and over-saw its transformation in both product line up and profitability leading to its listing in 2018 and the launch of its first SUV, the DBX in summer 2020.
In 2010, Coventry University awarded Andy an Honorary Doctorate of Technology and in 2014 he was appointed Professor, advising the University in the automotive field.
Prior to joining Aston Martin, Andy was Chief Operating Officer and Chief Planning Officer at Nissan Motor Co after holding a number of senior positions during a 24 year career with the firm. He is most well known as the architect of the Nissan LEAF.
Andy started his professional career in 1979 aged 16, as an apprentice at Automotive Products Limited (UK) and after six years with Austin Rover, he joined Nissan. He gained his ONC / HNC from Leamington Spa’s Mid-Warwickshire College of FE followed by a IIM Diploma / Degree in Industrial Management from Coventry University (Lanchester Polytechnic).
In the 2014 New Year’s Honours list Andy was named a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in recognition of services to the British automotive industry.
Andy is the Founder and Co-Trustee for the Palmer Foundation that seeks to give disadvantaged youths the opportunity of an apprenticeship.
Professor Phil Smith CBE
Chairman IOE & Former Chairman of Innovate UK
Phil is a Chairman and Director as well as an advisor mentor and speaker. As former Chief Executive and Chairman of Cisco UK and Ireland, Phil is passionate about innovation, skills, technology, digitisation and leadership. Phil is Chairman of IQE PLC, a leading advanced materials solutions company, headquartered in Cardiff, focused on the Compound Semiconductor market. Phil is also a non-executive director of Streeva a Fintech based growing company using blockchain based solutions to enhance payments.
In the broader innovation and skills space, Phil is also former chair of Innovate UK, the Government’s innovation agency as well as Chair of the Tech Partnership Degrees which is an employer led organisation championing digital skills. In his industry and government roles he also co-Chair of the Digital Skills Partnership and is on the board of the Digital Economy Council, is a member of the UKRI E-Infrastructure Advisory Board (EAB).
Additionally, Phil also sits on a number of advisory boards in organisations as diverse as Lloyds Register and the National Theatre.
Phil championed and is passionate about, innovation, entrepreneurship and productivity whilst at Cisco and continues now in many of his roles. He is founder member of the Productivity Leadership Group and a commercial trustee of Be the Business. He is additionally a Board Mentor for Critical Eye.
He has been recognised with several industry accolades and awards from mentorship for women to CSR, company culture, employee engagement and leadership as well as change and digitalisation. Those include Orange Business Leader of the year, a member of Wired 100 and listed in the inaugural 50 Kindest Leaders in 2018.
Phil’s contribution to industry has been recognised with Honorary Doctorates from Birmingham City, Warwick and Glasgow Universities and an Honorary Fellowship from Cardiff.
Phil is the founder of a group of CEOs and leaders who, since 2012 have raised close to £1m for Sport Relief participating with their teams in Triathlon based events.
Phil is a keen Triathlete and cyclist and has qualified in Triathlon for Team GB in 2014, 2015 and 2017, competing in Canada and the Netherlands.
Laura Shoaf
Chief Executive of West Midlands Combined Authority
Laura Shoaf CBE was appointed Chief Executive of the West Midlands Combined Authority in November 2021. Having previously led Transport for West Midlands, Laura has expanded her focus to include driving inclusive economic growth; increasing skills provision; regenerating land and housing; enhancing the environment and improving transport connectivity across the region.
A recognised expert who has advised on national policy, Laura secured and oversaw the delivery of a £4 billion transport investment package for the region. She was the first female Chair of the Urban Transit Group and during her term supported the transport industry on its recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, Laura was appointed by the Department for Transport as one of the UK’s first Violence Against Women and Girls Transport Champions, and is tasked with working with passenger groups to identify areas for improvement across the country.
Laura has a demonstrated track record of success in delivering change, most recently highlighted in securing the region’s Trailblazer Deeper Devolution Deal which will see a seismic shift in power and influence from Westminster to the West Midlands.
Professor Mark Radford CBE
National Director for Intensive Support, NHSE & Deputy Chief Nursing Officer, England
Professor Mark Radford is currently National Director of Intensive Support, and Deputy Chief Nursing Officer for England and was formerly the Chief Nurse of Health Education England. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mark led the national NHS vaccine workforce program ensuring the success in phase 1 delivery of 15m vaccinations. The program recruited and trained over 250k people including 90k clinicians and 70k volunteers in a few months to launch one of the world’s fastest programs. He also led the deployment of Student nurses in the pandemic response waves 1 and 2, with 71 Universities in England.
As Deputy Chief Nursing Officer for England, Mark supports the Chief Nursing Officer in ensuring the NHS workforce is fit for the future. This includes recruitment and retention, skills development, maintaining the quality of management and leadership, tackling inequality and breaking down barriers, ensuring places of work are rewarding, positive and filled with opportunity, and enabling more volunteers to support front-line staff.
Throughout his clinical career, Mark has maintained his academic interests. He has been involved in multiple research projects looking at the roles of nursing in advanced practice, gender disparity and pay, as well as big data analysis of nursing and retention, among others. He has also published five books on emergency and perioperative surgery throughout his career. He is also a Professor of Nursing at Birmingham City University and Coventry University, with research covering emergency care models, advanced practice, staffing, risk modelling, clinical decision-making, expertise and sociological issues in healthcare.
Mark was honoured with a CBE in The Queen’s New Year Honours 2022 list.
Professor Ian Campbell OBE
Interim Executive Chair for Innovate UK
Dr Ian Campbell was appointed Interim Executive Chair of Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency, in May 2018, having joined as Director for Health and Life Sciences in 2016. Ian is an experienced executive in life sciences and the diagnostics sector. He served as Chief Executive of Arquer Diagnostics, a company developing and commercialising immunoassay tests for cancers of the urinogenitary tract.
Previously he served as Chief Executive of Imperial College spin-out company Molecular Vision, developing a disposable, quantitative point-of-care diagnostic platform, before being acquired by Abingdon Health in 2012. Ian has also served as Commercial Director with Bespak Europe. Ian has a strong scientific background, gaining his PhD at the University of Glasgow.
Professor Philippe Vanrie
Head of Eureka
For almost 20 years (1999-2017), Philippe Vanrie was CEO of EBN, the leading pan-European Network bringing together 200+ Business & Innovation Centers (BICs), Innovation-based Incubators, Accelerators, Clusters, Innovation Agencies and Entrepreneurship Centers across Europe and beyond. A community gathering hundreds of business & innovation support organizations, thousands of smart innovators and high-potential entrepreneurs.
For four years (2017-2020), Philippe took over the mandate of Heading EUREKA, a Brussels-based inter-governmental organization supporting and funding innovators, knowledge actors, SMEs and industry leaders, across 40 countries (EU Countries but also UK, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, Canada, South Korea, South Africa, Chile, and Argentina).
He championed the transformation of EBN and EUREKA into high-caliber innovation networks, interacting between policy makers, promising innovative entrepreneurs and ecosystems enablers. Philippe became a reputed international expert in innovation, incubation/acceleration, entrepreneurship, economic development, public/private partnerships, and of course European funding & affairs. Philippe has indeed a long collaboration experience with the European Commission (EC) and other European institutions (EIB, EIT), as well as the European Space Agency (ESA), and a series of national & regional governmental agencies. He initiated and conducted a wide series of EC-funded collaborative projects in various fields:, regional innovation ecosystems (S3), digital entrepreneurship, clusters management and inter-clusters collaboration, satellite applications, open innovation (SAP, JP Morgan Chase, Oracle, Procter & Gamble), social innovation, internationalization of SMEs, and university/business cooperation.
He founded EcoSystemiX in 2020, a consultancy specialized in innovation Ecosystems, and worked 18 months (2021 & 2022) for Thesame Innovation, a regional innovation agency located in Annecy, in the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes Region, with the mission to renew its strategy & develop its partnerships. In 2022, after a 6-months assignment to structure the Secretariat of the D4DHub (Digital4 Development) initiative (DG-INTPA), he started a mission as Head of European Affairs at both the Walloon Agri-Food Cluster (Belgium) and later of the University of Vaasa (Finland), while conducting several missions & studies for the EC (DG-RTD), the EIC (European Innovation Council), the EIT (European Institute for Innovation & Technology), EY and Deloitte, in various fields such as bioeconomy, blue economy, circular economy, deep-tech scale-ups, Food-Tech and Ag-Tech.
He started 2023 by being nominated as Chair of an EU-Experts Group on R&I Knowledge Valorisation for the EC (DG RTD) within the framework of a Mutual Learning Exercise (Policy & Practices) across the EU. Engineer by education (M.Sc.), graduated from the Gembloux (B) Agronomic Engineering University (Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech/Liège University), and from the University of Louvain (B) in Innovation Management, Philippe started his career as a statistician at the University of Brussels (ULB).
Ambassador Thomas Reilly
Senior Advisor and Head of UK Public Policy at Covington & Burling LLP
Thomas Reilly graduated from the LSE and qualified as a commercial lawyer. He worked in London and Brussels before joining the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1998. He served in a range of South American and Middle Eastern countries before becoming Deputy Head of Mission at the British Embassy in Cairo and being named as the Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative to Misrata during the Arab Spring. He served as UK Ambassador to Morocco and Mauritania between 2017-2020, and, following Brexit, negotiated a number of bilateral agreements including on Education and Trade.
Thomas worked for Royal Dutch Shell between 2012 -2017 firstly as Head of Government Relations and then, as Senior Advisor on International and Regulatory Affairs, he worked on the merger between Shell and BG. He also led compliance teams working on Russian associated gas projects.
Since leaving the Foreign Office at the end of his posting to Morocco, Thomas has worked as a Senior Advisor to the law firm, Covington in which capacity he has advised major UK, US and EU companies on their disputes and relationships with Governments in the UK, the EU, the Middle East and Africa. He has recently established his own consultancy, helping companies identify and mitigate international geopolitical risk.
Thomas sits on the Trustee Board for a Moroccan girls’ education charity as well as on the Board of Governors for a school in Morocco. He is the President of the European political group ‘Renew’ for his Department in France.
Peter Loftus
Deputy Director UK Research Centre in Nondestructive Evaluation
Pete had a 38year career in Instrumentation and Measurement at Rolls-Royce where he developed a passion for the subject of measurement and a love of helping others to grow. As the company head of Measurement Engineering, with accountability for ensuring the creation, maintenance, and improvement of all forms of measurement capability for the company world-wide, he travelled and engaged widely across the company’s global footprint and key stakeholders in the field. He has also been active with numerous engineering professional bodies and youth interventions locally, nationally, and internationally.
Since leaving Rolls-Royce in 2018, Pete has developed a portfolio career to enable him to indulge his interests. He is a Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh; Chair of the Sensing Innovation Leadership Council; Deputy Director of the Research Centre in NDE; an assessor and monitoring officer for Innovate UK and a District Commissioner in Scouting.
He holds a Bachelors Degree in Applied Physics and a Masters in Gas Turbine Engineering.
He is a Past President of the European Virtual Institute for Gas Turbine Engineering; past chair off the ASME International Gas Turbine Institute Controls, Diagnostics, and instrumentation Committee; former member of the UK National Measurement Board; has held numerous roles with the IET, BINDT, and NCSLI as well as a CIM Conference organiser and Guest Editor of the International Journal of Turbomachinery Propulsion and Power. He reviews for Innovate UK, EPSRC, Euramet and ASME. He also has his own consultancy business: Evalu8ion Ltd. and is an Engineering Ambassador.
