Rosalind Foskett has taken up her new role as deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Worcester. Dr Foskett previously led work on widening participation, curriculum development, work-based learning and teaching-quality enhancement at the University of Southampton. In her new position, she will be charged with leading Worcester's academic development. The head of educational quality and development at Worcester, Marie Stoell, and six academic-institute heads will report to her. Dr Foskett has also been appointed professor of higher education at the institution.

The academic registrar of University College London has been named vice-chair of the Association of University Administrators. Christopher Hallas, who has spent 20 years in higher education management and administration, is interested in the professionalisation of these spheres and in student services within higher education. He is a member of the Academic Registrars Council, the Chartered Management Institute and the Public Management and Policy Association.

Tim Eastop has been named director of the Creative Campus Initiative - a consortium of 13 universities in the South East of England that will be involved in providing events, exhibitions and performances in the run-up to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Mr Eastop has previously worked on a number of arts projects, including the Arts Council England's International Artists Fellowship Programme. In his new role, he will be based at the initiative's lead institution, the University for the Creative Arts. The institutions involved in the initiative, which has secured ?1 million of support from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, will seek to engage young people in the Olympics through work with established and up-and-coming artists.

Food-safety expert Adrian Peters has been appointed the new dean of the Cardiff School of Health Sciences at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. Since moving to Cardiff in 1995, Professor Peters has been involved in research in areas including the control of microorganisms in food production and the application of food-safety management systems in the food industry. In 2005, he was awarded a University of Wales personal chair. He advises the UK's Automatic Vending Association and has also conducted research into the microbiology of vending machines.

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The head of The Robert Gordon University's School of Nursing and Midwifery, Jennie Parry, has announced her retirement. Ms Parry held a variety of nursing and health-related posts before she embarked on a career in teaching. She qualified as a clinical teacher at Foresterhill College in 1975, and as a registered tutor of nursing at Cardiff University in the 1980s. Having joined Robert Gordon in 1994, Ms Parry has been deeply involved in developing the school and has played a key role in the shaping of the Quality Assurance Agency's Scottish subject benchmark statements for nursing, midwifery and specialist community health nursing.

Sir John Chisholm has been named chair of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, the body that works to support innovation in these subject areas. Sir John is chairman of QinetiQ, the technology service provider that he developed from a collection of government-owned research laboratories into an international business. He is also chair of the Medical Research Council.

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The former head of the University of Lincoln's School of Media has been appointed associate professor in media and dean of the faculty of media, humanities and technology at the institution. David Sleight succeeds John Simons, who has been named executive dean of arts at Macquarie University in Australia.

David Gani and Philip Winn have been hired by the University of Strathclyde as part of its ambition to transform itself into a leading technological institution. Professor Gani takes on the role of deputy principal for external affairs and advancement. He joins after nearly eight years at the Scottish Funding Council, where he was involved in establishing the SFC's approach to funding knowledge exchanges between universities and external partners. Professor Winn joins as deputy principal for strategy. In his previous roles as vice-principal and dean of the faculty of science at the University of St Andrews, he worked to enhance links between teaching and research.

Rebecca Allen has been awarded the British Educational Research Association's best PhD dissertation prize. The doctoral graduate from the Institute of Education, University of London, earned the accolade for her thesis, "Choice-based secondary school admissions in England: Social stratification and the distribution of educational outcomes". It analyses the consequences of allowing parents to choose which school their children attend.

Award-winning literary translator Amanda Hopkinson has been appointed to a new chair at the University of East Anglia. Professor Hopkinson takes the chair in literary translation, which is thought to be the only one of its kind dedicated to the subject in the UK. The post has been created to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the founding of the British Centre for Literary Translation, established by W.G. Sebald, the late novelist, historian and poet. Professor Hopkinson is currently director of the centre.

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John Van Reenen, professor of economics at the London School of Economics, has been made joint recipient of the Yrjo Jahnsson Award in Economics 2009. He shares the honour with Fabrizio Zilibotti of the University of Zurich. The prize was presented to the pair by the Yrjo Jahnsson Foundation for their contribution to the analysis of technological innovation and its links with economic growth and labour markets. The award is handed out every two years to a European economist under the age of 45 who has made a significant contribution to theoretical and applied research in the discipline within Europe.

The director of the University of Leeds Centre for International Business has been named a senior research associate at the University of Oxford. Peter J. Buckley takes up the post at the Sanjaya Lall Programme for Technology and Management for Development, a research centre based at Oxford's department of international development.

The University of Central Lancashire has made Danielle Bewsher a lecturer in mathematics. She previously held a visiting lectureship at the University of Aberystwyth, where she taught astrophysics and solar physics.