Dr. Professor Rajani Naidoo

Professor Rajani Naidoo is Vice-President and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for People and Culture at the University of Exeter in the UK. Rajani leads on enhancing the institutional conditions for people to come together to inspire creativity and foster new discoveries in research, to develop education for the future, and to be a supportive and inclusive community.

 

She brings extensive research and leadership experience to this role, having held senior positions including Vice-President for Community and Inclusion and Research Director of the International Centre for Higher Education Management at the University of Bath. Before this, she contributed to an institution that aimed to develop a new model of higher education for post-apartheid South Africa.

 

She is a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge, London, and KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. She is globally recognised for her research on competition and collaboration in higher education, the contribution of universities to global social justice, and the responsibilities of universities in the age of artificial intelligence.

 

She has supervised more than 30 doctoral students to completion and has featured in the Stanford/Elsevier top 2 percent of cited researchers in her field.

 

At Exeter, her leadership is visionary and transformative, focusing on collaboration, interdisciplinarity, belonging, and institutional integrity to enhance research, education, and impact.