Dr Gary Brown
Pro Vice-Chancellor & Executive Dean - Greenwich Business School (Interim)
Gary has over 20 years of experience in higher education, spanning academic leadership, portfolio development, and institutional strategy. Prior to his appointment as Dean, he served as Associate Dean Student Success at Greenwich, leading cross-faculty strategies that delivered significant improvements in continuation, awarding gaps, graduate outcomes, and student satisfaction. His leadership was central to securing EFMD re-accreditation and driving curriculum reform aligned to institutional and sector priorities.
Before joining Greenwich, Gary held senior roles at the University of Liverpool Management School, including Director of Education for his subject group and later Director of Online and Innovation. In these roles, he led the transformation of the School’s online provision, expanding postgraduate taught programmes, embedding high-quality student experience at scale, and overseeing curriculum redesign to meet market and pedagogic demands.
He began his career at Edge Hill University, where he was Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer, completing his PhD at University of Liverpool. Across all roles, Gary has championed ambitious, data-driven, and student-focused approaches to academic leadership. He brings energy, clarity, and strategic intent to his work, building high-performing teams and fostering a culture of purposeful, values-led education.
Professor Natasha Vall
Pro Vice-Chancellor & Executive Dean - Faculty of Law, Arts and Social Sciences
Hilary Orpin is an Associate Dean of Student Success. She is a Higher Education strategic leader with a proven track record in developing partnerships, leading a department, leading curriculum design, validation, and inspection.
She is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE. Her teaching and learning expertise were developed through lecturing in childhood, youth studies, education studies and youth and community work.
Prior to higher education she had a career as a professionally qualified youth and community worker, within the public and third sector. Managing a youth arts centre, road safety education projects as a regional worker for a national charity and led alternative curriculum projects alongside teaching excluded and disaffected 14-16 year olds.
She is a co-author of the book Transition into Higher Education.
Professor Stephen Corbett
Interim Pro-Vice-Chancellor
Professor Corbett joined the Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences as Deputy Dean in 2025. He is now the interim Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the faculty of Education, Health and Human Sciences.
Prior to joining Greenwich, Stephen was Interim Executive Dean for Humanities & Social Sciences at the University of Portsmouth (2023-2025) and before this Head of School for Education, Languages and Linguistics (2017-2023) during which time he also established the institution's Centre for Continuing Professional Development.
His career in education began in the further education sector, where he supported students with special educational needs and disabilities. He then trained as a Teacher in Accounting and Business and later progressed into leadership roles. After over a decade in the further education sector he transitioned from his college leadership role to leading a university collaborative network of further education initial teacher education providers over six campuses. This provision he later developed into an externally funded national programme which retrained military personnel to become qualified further education teachers. In recognition of his work across both Further and Higher Education sectors, Stephen was awarded an Advance HE National Teaching Fellowship in 2020.
Professor Peter Griffiths
Pro Vice-Chancellor & Executive Dean - Faculty of Engineering and Science
Professor Peter Griffiths' interest in nanotechnology, traditionally known as colloid science, started with a final year undergraduate research project on ferrofluids. Thereafter followed a PhD (University of Bristol, 1991), focused on developing NMR and scattering methodology to quantify the dynamics of polymer-polymer and polymer-particle blends, that saw Professor Griffiths' interests broaden into concentrated particle dispersions, and then to polymer-surfactant and polymer-small molecule systems, with post-doctoral research periods at University of Bristol (1991-1993) and the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm (1993-1995).
In 1995, Professor Griffiths was appointed to a lectureship at Cardiff University that further consolidated these research themes, and took his attention towards the drug delivery field, in particular polymer-drug and polymer-protein conjugates, small molecule gels and vesicle dispersions.
Professor Griffiths’ contribution to the research field and education in general was recognized with the award of a DSc (University of Bristol, 2005), a "docenture" (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 2005) and conferment of Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, FRSC in 2002. He has also received distinguished service awards from both the SCI and the RSC.
