Professor Deborah Gill to step down as Pro-Vice-Provost (Student Experience)

In January 2021, Deborah stepped into an interim role as Vice-Provost (Education & Student Experience) where she worked to galvanise and lead the academic community in keeping students and the quality of our education central to decision making during the pandemic. She led on implementing effective remote learning tools and practices and establishing a ‘Blended by Design’ temporary operating model for the return to on-campus learning in 2021. 

Prior to her interim position, Deborah held the role of UCL’s first Pro-Vice-Provost (Student Experience). Appointed in January 2019, she was an institutional champion for improving the student experience, listening to students’ voices and working in partnership with our elected student officers to continuously improve our education offer. This transformation in how student representatives and union officers engaged with the senior leadership team proved vital to successfully steering our way through the early months of the pandemic response. 

Professor Deborah Gill joined the UCL community in 2002 as a Senior Lecturer in the Academic Centre for Medical Education.  She was appointed Deputy Director of UCL Medical School in 2010 before being promoted to Director of the School in 2015. There, Deborah led on the implementation of a new contemporary integrated curriculum and set up the highly successful Medical School Education Consultancy Unit which has accomplished a range of transnational capacity building and collaboration projects across North Africa and the Middle and Far East regions. 

UCL President and Provost, Michael Spence, said: 

"Our huge thanks go to Deborah for her service and dedication to UCL and, in particular, her significant contribution as Pro-Vice-Provost (Student Experience) these past few years. Under her leadership, we have strengthened student representation in key decision-making processes and increased the ways in which individual and collective student feedback is heard and acted upon at UCL, contributing to an overall increase in both our NSS and PTES scores.  As interim Vice-Provost (Education & Student Experience), she has been a valuable member of the emergency pandemic response leadership team and I am enormously grateful for her stewardship of this portfolio through what has been one of the most extraordinary periods in higher education. I am sure she will be highly successful in her new role”.  

Deborah will leave her UCL role in March 2022. We thank her for her commitment to improving education and the student experience at UCL and wish her the very best in her exciting new position at the University of Southampton.