Bryony James

Professor Bryony James is Provost at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

She was previously Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research at Waikato University and, prior to that, Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Auckland.

She has professional interests in academic leadership, research dissemination and assessment, and the structures that enable or impede inter-disciplinary teaching and research. She was a member of the TEC’s Performance Based Research Fund Sector Reference Group 2022-2023, and is the chair of Universities NZ Open Access Steering Group.  Her own disciplinary research is in materials science and engineering with a particular focus on food materials and how their microstructure influences their functional properties.  Her teaching activity has been in the area of materials engineering and she has received numerous teaching excellence awards including, in 2013, the Ako Aotearoa National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award for “Sustained Excellence in Teaching”.

She is a member Physical Sciences Investment Panel, for Return on Science.  She has previously served on the board of WaikatoLink and QuakeCoRE, NZ Centre for Earthquake Resilience, Te Hiranga Rū.  In 2019 she was made a Fellow of Engineering NZ.