John Wood

Professor John Wood CBE FREng is Secretary General of the Association of Commonwealth Universities. He graduated from the University of Sheffield in metallurgy and studied for his PhD at the University of Cambridge (Darwin College), where he subsequently stayed on as Goldsmith’s Research Fellow at Churchill College. In 1994, he was awarded a higher doctorate from Sheffield and has an honorary doctorate from the University of Cluj-Napoca in Romania, where he is also a ‘citizen of honour’. He has held academic posts at the Open University, followed by the University of Nottingham, where he was Dean of Engineering. Professor Wood has also served as Principal of the Faculty of Engineering, and subsequently as Senior International Advisor at Imperial College London. He is still a visiting professor at Imperial.

Professor Wood is a non-executive director of a number of companies, including Bio-Nano Consulting, and sits on the advisory board of the British Library. Currently, he is on the board of the Joint Information Services Committee (JISC), responsible for the UK academic computing network, and chairs their Support for Research Committee. He is also involved with a number of charities, including acting as chair of the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP).