Pamela Gillies

Pamela Gillies, CBE, FRSA, FAcSS, FRSE (born 1953) is a Scottish academic and educator, appointed as Principal/Vice-Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University in March 2006.

The first in her family to go to University, Pamela Gillies attended Aberdeen University from which she graduated in 1976 with a BSc in Physiology, a PGCE and a Masters in Education and Philosophy. In 1976 she was awarded a competitive Scottish Home and Health Department Fellowship to train in community health in England and graduated first with an MMedSci and then subsequently with a Ph.D in Epidemiology from the University of Nottingham.

She began her research career in 1978 as a research officer with the Department of Education in Sheffield evaluating health promotion initiatives and moved back to Nottingham in 1984 to take up a Lectureship in Public Health Medicine. She moved through the ranks to Senior Lecturer, Professor of Public Health and Head of the School of Community Health Sciences before becoming a Pro Vice-Chancellor of the University of Nottingham in 2001.

During her career, Pamela has worked in San Francisco on an Abbott Fellowship for AIDS Research (1988), in Geneva at the World Health Organisation's Global Programme on AIDS (1989), at Harvard as a Harkness Fellow and Visiting Professor in Health and Human Rights (1992–93) and in London on a seconded post as the first Executive Director of Research at the Health Education Authority for England (1996–99).

She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was elected a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, Royal College of Physicians of London in 2002. She was elected as an Academician of the Academy of Learned Societies of Social Sciences in 2005. In March 2015, Gillies was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Amongst other roles, she has served on ESRC Committees on Evidence Based Policy and on People at the Centre of Information and Communication Technologies and has acted as Chair of the Peckam Pulse Healthy Living Centre, the Government's Task Force on Unintended Conceptions in Young People and the European Commission's Working Group on HIV/AIDS, Human Rights and Discrimination.

She has researched and written widely on cross-cultural perspectives on HIV/AIDS, sexuality and health, partnership responses to health improvement and community development responses to inequalities in health focusing on the potential of social action for health. She was involved in a Gates Foundation funded research project in Kolkata, India, to prevent HIV transmission in sex workers and their families.

She was installed as Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian University in March 2006 after a career in higher education. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to education and public health.