Professor Roland Levinsky (16 October 1943 – 1 January 2007) was an academic researcher in biomedicine and a university senior manager.

[1] His father emigrated from the Lithuania/Poland area to South Africa to escape persecution; many of his relatives died in Nazi-German death camps.

He worked for several years at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London where he performed Britain's first successful bone marrow transplant.

[3] Subsequently, from 1990, he served as dean and director of research at the Institute of Child Health of University College, London, and from 1999 until he moved to Plymouth.

[4] These moves undoubtedly gave Plymouth more the structure of the longer-established UK universities, and its position in the education media's league tables rose sharply in his period of office.