This year marked the end of my full-time career as an academic – I retired from the University of Manchester at the end of September 2025. I was a lecturer at Cambridge University from 1989 to 1998, when I moved to the University of Sheffield. I was a professor of physics at Sheffield, and also, between 2009 and 2016, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation. I moved to the University of Manchester in 2020, where latterly I have had the role of Vice-President for Regional Innovation and Civic Engagement. I was touched and honoured by the kind words spoken about me at an event to mark my retirement in September. UoM President Duncan Ivison, Manchester City Council Chief Executive Tom Stannard, and the Chair of UoM’s Board of Governors Phillipa Hurd all spoke, and GM Mayor Andy Burnham sent a video message. In response, I said something along these lines:
Thanks for all your kind words. I’m conscious that I’ve only been at Manchester for 5 years, in contrast to many of you who have devoted a much longer time to the institution.
My career has taken me from Cornell, through Cambridge, to Sheffield (with quite a lot of time in Swindon, first on secondment to run the cross-council nanotechnology programme, then as EPSRC Council Member), and, as Duncan said, it’s taken a number of twists and turns – I often describe myself as a deviant physicist. There’s been science – both blue skies and highly collaborative with industry, public engagement, science policy, and contributions to local economic development and attempts to influence national policy.
I think my time at Manchester has been a culmination of that career, where I’ve been able to bring together all those different strands in the service of a great university in a great city.
I do want to thank Nancy Rothwell, who saw something in that weird patchwork of experience that could be useful in Manchester, and encouraged me to make the move from Sheffield.
My start date at Manchester was April 1st 2020. In retrospect, this was not great – the first pandemic lockdown was legally imposed on March 26th. Here I want to thank Lisa Gledhill here for helping me settle in in such a difficult time – and for all the great support I’ve had from her since.
As we all remember, it was a weird and difficult year. I remember one of the earliest in-person meetings was with John Holden, outside a derelict flat-roof pub in Heywood called the Three Arrows. That’s when the glamour of my new role really set in.
One good thing that emerged from the pandemic though – we had a series of zoom calls with Nancy, the late Sir Howard Bernstein, Chris Oglesby, John Holden and others about how Manchester should put innovation at the heart of its plans for the city’s post-Covid recovery.
In those calls with Howard, the idea of Innovation GM came up, connecting this with my work on the need for a more even distribution of innovation funding across the UK. We sketched out a plan for a “Triple helix” organisation that would give government confidence that it could devolve money to the city. Chris Oglesby, of Bruntwood, helped us engage with the business community, supported by Jürgen Maier’s advocacy for the manufacturing sector.
There was then a pretty intense period of trying to steer the national debate, building on my paper with Tom Forth, The Missing Four Billion, while at the same time building a collaborative infrastructure in Greater Manchester – John Holden was also at the heart of this.
It’s been great to work with colleagues from GMCA and our Local Authorities on this – both the political leaders, and the senior officers.
I am an idealist about democracy, and I’ve got huge respect for anyone who has put themselves up to a popular vote, from the Mayor, through leaders like Elise Wilson & Bev Craig, through to the local councillors who are such an important vehicle for the views of their communities. At the university, we really value our engagement with local councillors, which Mags Bradbury coordinates so effectively.
It’s great that Tom Stannard from MCC, and John Wrathmell and Lisa Dale-Clough from GMCA, have been able to come tonight – it’s been a genuine pleasure to work with you and your colleagues.
I think we were pretty successful on both fronts – the principle of locally co-created innovation programmes was accepted in the Levelling Up White Paper, and real money coming to GM through the Innovation Accelerator pilot. Levelling Up may have disappeared with Boris Johnson’s career, but the Innovation Accelerator has lived on into the current government.
The pandemic also saw regular conversations between the VCs of the GM universities. These initially focused on the very practical issues all the universities were facing common, but it also gave us a basis for more long-term collaboration. Julian Skyrme was instrumental in building on this understanding to create a formal Civic University Agreement, sponsored by the Mayor. It was Julian’s great initiative to create a Citizens’ Panel to feed into our discussions of priorities for the collaboration.
I think we all realised that there was some levelling up to do in GM as well – there are big economic disparities across the conurbation, which translate into big inequalities in health outcomes and other measures of well-being.
This issue had already come into focus for me in my time at Sheffield. Sarah Want will remember the struggle session we were invited to with the leader of Barnsley Council, who was very forthright in asking us “what have you lot on your leafy west Sheffield hill ever done for the people of Barnsley?”. But it was a fair challenge and I’m convinced we do need to be able to convince our local politicians that universities do bring benefit to the citizens they represent, all the more so in current political times when the social license of Universities is being questioned.
Reflecting this issue, Andy Westwood had initiated the Oldham Economic Review, in collaboration with Oldham College, Oldham Council, and some community groups, which I learned a great deal from participating in. My contribution to this debate has been to insist on my right as a physicist to state the obvious – what’s wrong with poor places is that people there haven’t got enough money.
Since then, there’s been some real thought put into how best to develop the innovation and skills needed to support the private sector economy of what is the least economically successful part of GM – its north east. The goal here is both to support the existing business base to become more productive, and to attract high value inward investment. This coincided with the Mayor’s priorities, which involved setting up a Mayoral Development Zone in parts of Oldham, Rochdale and Bury – now called Atom Valley.
Another outcome for me of the Oldham Economic Review was to help me to understand how important FE colleges are in towns like Rochdale, Oldham and Bury. We tried to use the Innovation Accelerator to bring FE colleges more into the city-region’s innovation system, not wholly successfully at first. However, InnovateUK came back with proposals for a Further Education Innovation Fund. It took a bit of a push from Nancy and I to get that into a workable form, but the resulting Further Education Innovation Programme, run by the GM Colleges group on behalf of all nine FE colleges in GM, has been a huge success thanks to the efforts of Richard Caulfield and Coral Grainger. I think this has has been transformational in improving the relationship between the Higher Education and Further Education sectors in GM.
So I think there’s a very coherent strategy now about regional innovation and the University’s role in it. The SISTER development provides a new growth pole for the city-centre knowledge economy, while we build links between SISTER and the other outstanding R&D assets of the Oxford Road Corridor with Atom Valley. We’re now giving this work a national dimension through our partnership with Cambridge, so successfully pushed along by Lou Cordwell and John Holden.
Looking forward, we’ve welcomed a new President to the University of Manchester, Duncan Ivison, and we’ve spent his first year developing a new 10 year strategy for the University, which will place even more emphasis on innovation and the civic role. The government has announced a new Local Innovation Partnership Fund, emphasising co-creation between city-region actors and UKRI. Plans for a new physical innovation centre are at an advanced state – the Sustainable Materials and Manufacturing Centre will open in Rochdale in late 2027.
One always has mixed feelings stepping down from a role like this. I’m passionate about the importance of this work, emphasising the central role of a great civic university in a great world city. The work is unfinished – so there’s never a good time to step down.
On the other hand, no-one is irreplaceable, and I leave the project in good hands. Duncan will be energetically pushing the agenda from the top of the organisation, John Holden is ideally placed to take the reins from me as the new VP for Innovation and Civic Engagement, with many committed colleagues in the university and city-region working together to make it happen. Thanks to everyone, and good luck!