Paul Boyle

Professor Paul Boyle took up the post of President and Vice-Chancellor of the University on 1st October 2014.

Previously, Professor Boyle was Chief Executive of the Economic and Social Research Council, the leading UK social science funding agency. He was also President of Science Europe which represents 52 science funders from 27 European countries, and International Champion of Research Councils UK.

Professor Boyle graduated with a B.A. degree in Geography from Lancaster University in 1986, having spent a year at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on an exchange. He returned to Lancaster to undertake his PhD. He held his first lectureship at the University of Wales, Swansea and then moved to the University of Leeds, spending a year at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand during this period. He moved to take up a Chair in Human Geography at the University of St Andrews in 1999, where he was Head of the School of Geography and Geosciences.

A quantitative social scientist with varied research interests in the broad areas of population studies (demography) and health research (epidemiology). He has over 100 peer-reviewed publications on various topics including the influence of family migration on women, health inequalities and the clustering of disease, and the links between migration and health.

He was Director of the ESRC-funded Longitudinal Studies Centre – Scotland, Co-Director of the ESRC-funded Centre for Population Change, and Co-Investigator on both the Wellcome Trust-funded Scottish Health Informatics Programme and the ESRC-funded Administrative Data Liaison Service. He was the Founding Director of the Social Dimensions of Health Institute, which was a joint initiative between the universities of St. Andrews and Dundee. He also served as President of the British Society for Populations Studies.