Stuart Croft

Professor Stuart Croft is Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Warwick, which employs some 6,000 people, has some 25,000 students, and a turnover approaching £600m per year.

Stuart joined Warwick in 2007 as Professor of International Security and has since served the University's Pro Vice- Chancellor, and subsequently as Provost.

Outside Warwick, Stuart chairs the Board of the Equality Challenge Unit, the sector agency that leads on equalities and diversity, as well as sitting on various Boards including the Russell Group, and The Guild of European Research Intensive Universities (a body of 18 institutions across the continent that Warwick led in establishing). He is also chair of the Midlands Innovation board (the group of the region's leading eight research intensive universities), and is a member of the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership Board, where he is the co-chair of the Skills sub-committee.

Career and interests

Stuart's field of scholarship is in international security. Following a PhD at the University of Southampton, he worked in London at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, before moving to the University for Birmingham, where he worked for nearly 20 years, including a period as Head of Social Sciences. At this time he also served as Programme Director for the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) 'New Security Challenges Programme'; the ESRC, Arts and Humanities Research Council and Foreign and Commonwealth Office's 'Radicalisation' programme; and later, the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory/ESRC 'Integrator' research programme.

His research has been funded by the European Union, the ESRC, AHRC, British Academy, NATO, Nuffield and the Cadbury Trust. He has served as the Ngee Ann Kongsi distinguished professor at the Rajaratnam School at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and is a past chair of the British International Studies Association. He has also been elected as an Academician in the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

He has published over a dozen books and more than 50 other works on arms control, NATO and counter terrorism as key themes. His central works include Culture, Crisis and America's War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Securitizing Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has also supervised 32 research students who have succeeded in passing their PhD.

Born in Leicester, he went to Grammar School in Woking before embarking on his academic career. He has lived in the Midlands for the majority of his life, currently in north Worcestershire, and is a season ticket holder at Aston Villa football club.