President and Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Keith Burnett FRS
THE POWER OF PEOPLE President and Vice-Chancellor Professor Sir Keith Burnett FRS has confirmed his long-stated intention to retire following his 65th birthday and will step down later in the year. We asked him to reflect on his time leading the University of Sheffield.
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ust over a decade ago, I became Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sheffield. I applied for the job on the recommendation of another Welsh scientist, Professor Gareth Roberts, who served as Vice-Chancellor from 1991 to 2000, and who had a deep love for the city and University. But my connection to Sheffield was also personal. My daughter was studying architecture, hard at work in the Arts Tower, and it was in Sheffield that she met her husband-to-be, also an architecture student. As a physicist, I already knew some of the important scholarship which was being done in Sheffield. So I agreed to put myself forward. What I found here was both new and yet familiar. I grew up in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, a place which had once been home to industries founded on steel and coal. I knew that these communities were full of talented people, but that opportunities had been hard to come by in the difficult decades during which these industries had contracted or, in the case of coal, almost disappeared. As a scientist who had worked in the US, as well as at Oxford and Imperial, I also knew that knowledge could make a powerful difference in the world. Industries and jobs depended on productivity. Excellent hospitals needed highly trained doctors and research into the diseases which are no respecters of 2018/2019 | YOUR UNIVERSITY 27
