At Liverpool, he was Head of the Department of Geography from 2004 to 2007, and Dean of the Faculty of Social and Environmental Studies from 2007 to 2009.
In 2010 he was appointed as Vice President for Academic Affairs at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China, a post he held until 2014.
In that year, he joined Queen Mary University of London as its first Vice Principal (International), continuing in that role until 2017.
As a geographer, he has published widely on the relationships between industrial change and regional development.
He was married to the late Jeanette Henderson (1953-2019), a mental health academic, most recently of the Open University in the UK.