Simon Gaskell

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Simon James Gaskell (born 2 May 1950) is a British chemist and university administrator. He is the chair of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) and the chair of the board of governors at the University of Plymouth. He was previously the president and principal of Queen Mary University of London and the vice‑president for research at the University of Manchester.

Gaskell studied at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School and the University of Bristol, where he earned a BSc and a PhD in chemistry. After his PhD, he began his research career in 1974 at the University of Glasgow. He then led the Mass Spectrometry Unit at the University of Wales College of Medicine and spent a sabbatical year at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina.

In 1987 he moved to the United States to become Professor of Experimental Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and he also served as Adjunct Professor of Pharmacology and Chemistry at the University of Houston from 1989. He returned to the United Kingdom in 1993 to join UMIST as Professor of Mass Spectrometry, became Head of Chemistry in 1999, and, after the UMIST–Manchester merger, was Associate Vice President for Research in 2004 and Vice President for Research in 2006.

Gaskell joined Queen Mary University of London as Principal in October 2009. He has chaired the board of the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) from 2013 to 2017 and served as Treasurer for Universities UK starting in August 2012. Since March 2019 he has chaired the board of the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. He has been a member of the University of Plymouth’s board of governors since 2019 and its chair since 2022.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and works on mass spectrometry applications in biomedical science. His research falls under proteomics, the study of all proteins in a cell, using mass spectrometry to measure protein amounts and lifetimes. He has studied the parasite Trypanosoma brucei, which causes sleeping sickness in parts of the world.

In 2012, Queen Mary University of London faced criticism over staff dismissals linked to research income, publication counts, and journal impact factors. The institution published a FAQ in response, and Gaskell contributed a piece to Times Higher Education addressing the debate.