Council member – Research England
Period of appointment – three years, from April 2019 to March 2021 and extended to March 2023.
Dr Richard Armour has extensive experience in higher education, having served in senior faculty and administrative positions at universities in the UK, Hong Kong and Australia. Richard was the Secretary-General of Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee (UGC) until December 2017.
An MA graduate of the University of Glasgow, he subsequently took an MSc degree and then a PhD at the University of London. His research and publications have concentrated principally on the nature of knowledge, its relationship to student learning and more recently on higher education policy.
On graduation, Richard began his career in universities in Glasgow and Edinburgh in the period 1979 to 1992. At that point, he moved to Hong Kong to take up the post of Director of Academic Planning in the President’s Office at CityU, the City University of Hong Kong. Whilst at CityU he secured a substantial competitive research grant and was seconded as Principal Investigator to lead the (US$1.2 million) project on the nature of student learning in HK universities. That was followed by a period as Registrar of the (then) new Open University of Hong Kong.
In 2006, Richard moved to Australia and joined Griffith University. He returned to Hong Kong in 2008 to take up the position of Senior Advisor and Chief of Staff to the President at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Most recently he was appointed Secretary-General of the University Grants Committee (UGC) from January 2012. The UGC is the main funding, policymaking and planning body for Hong Kong’s highly-ranked university sector. It serves also as the main research grants awarding body.
In 2014 he was appointed as a Justice of the Peace by the government of Hong Kong.
Last updated: 31 March 2022