Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol, Professor of Higher Education (emeritus) at the University of Oxford and Joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education. He is also an Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University and Professorial Associate of the University of Melbourne. Simon worked for 15 years in Australia as a research officer in four different organisations focused on national policy, prior to his first academic post. He completed his PhD at the age of 45 years. He formerly worked at Monash and Melbourne universities in Australia and at UCL Institute of Education in London, and from 2015-2024 was Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE).   

Simon’s research is focused primarily on global, international and comparative higher education, global science, higher education in East Asia, and the contributions of higher education to the common good. He has authored or edited 35 books on higher education and his research is widely published and cited (Google h-index 92). Simon is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Social Sciences in UK and of the Society for Research into Higher Education, and a member of Academia Europaea. In 2014 Simon was the Clark Kerr Lecturer on Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and received the Research Achievement Award at the US Association for the Study of Higher Education. In 2017 he received an honorary doctorate in Social Sciences at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He has advisory functions at Tsinghua University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (the Academic Ranking of World Universities), the University of Tokyo, Lingnan University in Hong Kong, the Education University of Hong Kong, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and the National University of Chile.