Simon Marginson - Biography#

Simon Marginson is Professor of International Higher Education at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London, UK. From October 2015 onwards he will be director of the ESCRC/HEFCE Centre for Global Higher Education, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council for 2015-2020.

Simon Marginson completed his doctorate on markets and positional competition in education at the University of Melbourne, Australia in 1996 and was Professor of Higher Education there in 2006-2013. He has served as Visiting Professor at Hiroshima University Japan, and in advisory roles at Tokyo University, Peking University, and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. In 2014 he was the clark Kerr Lecturer on Higher Education at the University of California. Marginson is Joint Editor-in-Chief of Higher Education (with Jussi Valimaa from Finland), the principal world journal in higher education studies, and a board member of among others British Journal of Sociology of Education, Thesis Eleven, Higher Education Policy and Journal of Studies in International Education. He serves on the International Advisory Committee of the Academic Ranking of World Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. He has prepared three reports for OECD. Four of his books have been translated into Chinese and papers translated into Chinese, French and Spanish.

Marginson focuses on the international and global aspects of universities to contribute to their reflexive evolution and better understand the global dimension of human activity. He uses qualitative case studies, semi-structured interviews and critical policy studies. Recent work focuses on global university competition, positioning, comparison and ranking; higher education and science in East Asia; the human rights of mobile cross-border students; and comparative investigation of the public (social) role of universities. Since 1992 he has written or edited 23 scholarly books, published over 350 papers and graduated 21 doctoral students.