Professor Liz Bacon PhD, CEng, CSci, CITP, FBCS, FIScT, PFHEA is Deputy Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Abertay where she leads teaching and learning, research and knowledge exchange, academic partnerships and the University’s Digital Strategy. She is a Trustee and Director of Bletchley Park Trust, and President of the European Quality Assurance Network for Informatics Education (EQANIE). She was President of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, in the year 2014-15 and is a past Chair of the BCS Academy of Computing and the CPHC (Council of Professors and Heads of Computing) national committee. Liz is a Professor of Computer Science with over a hundred refereed publications and circa 100 invited talks/keynotes.
She is passionate about student and staff achievement, the student experience, widening participation, professionalism and how technology can transform education to provide flexible, intelligent and personalised learning. She has led many successful initiatives in supporting these ambitions. For example, working with colleagues to transform the student experience, resulting in Abertay achieving 11th in the National Student Survey (NSS) in 2020, contributing to the award of “UK University of the Year for Teaching Quality” by the Times & Sunday Times Good University Guide 2021. She initiated and led a scheme to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds, expanding their horizons and experiencing cultures and education very different to their own. Supporting them to learn Spanish in Chile. Their experience was truly life changing. She introduced employability initiatives which contributed to an average increase of 11 percent in students from over 20 disciplines, achieving a professional/graduate level job, over a four-year period.
Her main research focus is in technology enhanced learning and systems she has developed, impacting the education and training of hundreds of professionals and members of the public, from Europe to Australia. Finally, being a passionate advocate of the benefits of technology she led an initiative for many years to develop systems to deliver efficient, effective and accurate information to staff and students. This includes delivering leading-edge technology to support teaching and learning. Her experience is now driving the digital transformation programme at Abertay.