Campus Talks by Times Higher Education

While academia offers some well-trodden career paths – from PhD then post-doc to lecturer, professor, departmental head and ultimately into university leadership – there are plenty of alternative routes to success in higher education.

On this week’s episode of Campus Talks, we find out how individuals can carve out their own unique careers within the university hierarchy while still demonstrating the necessary knowledge and skills to those all-important promotion and recruitment panels.

Harriet Dunbar-Morris, the new deputy president and chief academic officer at South East Technological University (SETU), in Ireland, offers her take on how those in higher education can best prepare for the next career move and what university recruiters themselves could do to attract a greater diversity of talent.

Harriet, who was previously pro vice-chancellor academic and provost at the University of Buckingham, shares her own career building strategies, what success looks like for her and why demonstrating impact can and should go beyond just publication and funding records.

An expert in student-centred instructional design talks through the process of creating effective university courses, including the potential of artificial intelligence to support feedback and revision

When course design is undertaken backwards, learning outcomes become the starting point, then assessment and finally classroom activities. The aim is to create a learning environment where students feel motivated and engaged. 

But what are the key considerations for creating effective modules and units and the indicators that show this has been achieved? 

For this episode, we talk to Daniel Guberman, a senior instructional developer and assistant director of student-centred pedagogy in the Center for Instructional Excellence at Purdue University. Guberman is co-author, with colleagues Emily M. Bonem and Chantal Levesque-Bristol, of Designing Impactful College Courses: Applying Self-Determination Theory to Unleash the Potential of Autonomy-Supportive Learning Environments (Routledge, 2026). He brings to this conversation a keen interest in grading protocols and insights from Purdue's long-running Impact instructor development programme.

To learn more about course design for a new age, head to the latest Campus spotlight guide.

To book a place at the Innovation & Impact Summit 2026 in Seoul on 17-19 November: Book tickets | THE Innovation & Impact Summit 2026.

A world leading data visualisation expert talks about leading the global Human Reference Atlas initiative and how collaboration enables researchers to think far bigger

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“Oftentimes it's said that if you want to go fast, you go alone, but I don't think you can go far this way. If you want to go far, you have to go together.”

So states Katy Börner during this episode of Campus Talks, in which we ask her about her ground-breaking project aimed at mapping all the anatomical structures and human cells in the human body, the Human Reference Atlas (HRA).

This project relies on the input of thousands of researchers across multiple disciplines from all over the world, including several other ambitious physiological ‘atlasing’ efforts which are working in parallel to the HRA.

The Victor H. Yngve Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Information Science at Indiana University, Katy is also a founding director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science (CNS) Center and she is a curator of the international Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition.

She explains how she developed such an interest in data visualisation work and why she has embraced an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to research throughout her career.

 

To find out more about the Human Reference Atlas:

Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP): 3D Human Reference Atlas construction and usage

Human Reference Atlas introduction and training

Upcoming events for those interested in the Human Reference Atlas

Whole Person Physiome Jamboree, August 24 to 25, 2026

Human Reference Atlas, Human Phenotype Ontology, Whole Person Physiome and other EU efforts hackathon, August 27 to 28.

 

To book a place at the Innovation & Impact Summit 2026 in Seoul from 17 to 19 November: Book tickets | THE Innovation & Impact Summit 2026.

Outreach is the way in which universities share their research and expertise with groups beyond the institution. Think school visits, science demonstrations, workshops, campus tours, online resources, summer school or festivals. These activities are often aimed at widening participation and inspiring children, teenagers and others – no matter their background – to pursue higher education. 

And it is works. The Higher Education Access Tracker service found that UK students eligible for free school meals who engaged in intensive outreach were up to 48 per cent more likely to progress to higher education.

For this episode, we speak to Lorraine Coghill, who is the deputy director of science engagement at Durham University. With a PhD in biomedical and clinical laboratory sciences, she has over 20 years’ of educational engagement experience, working with schools, universities, science centres, festivals, and educational and community organisations in the UK and Europe. She also contributes to national and international engagement initiatives, including Project Earth, and serves as co-chair of the Space North East England Skills and Outreach Group. Durham’s Stargoal project, which brings together football, physics and gender representation in sport, won the Partnering with Schools category at the 2024 Odgen Trust Outreach Awards. 

To learn more about the secrets of successful university outreach, head to our latest spotlight guide.

In a globalised world, and the increased internationalisation of higher education, multilingualism can be a key strength for universities. The ability to communicate in more than one language has cognitive and learning benefits, as well as boosting communication skills, employability, cultural awareness and an open mindset.

So, how can universities, which often host speakers of scores of languages, capitalise on this skill set?

For this episode, we talk to Anwei Feng, a professor in language education whose research and extensive publications focus on bi- and trilingualism with a particular interest in Chinese minority languages. He is chair professor of multilingual education in the School of Education and English in the Institution of Asia and Pacific Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Feng, who speaks Mandarin, English and several Chinese dialects, has worked at universities in China, Qatar, Hong Kong, Singapore and the UK, where he did his PhD. He is a key founder and vice-president of the Chinese Society of Multilingualism and Multilingual Education and is co-editor, with Bob Adamson, Zhen Li and Christine Lee, of Nurturing Glocal Talents: The Role of China’s Transnational Higher Education (Routledge), which will be published later this year.

For more advice and insight to support student success in the multilingual classroom, head to the latest spotlight guide on Campus.