Pamela Gillies was appointed to lead the investigation into troubled Dundee University after a long career in higher education.
The position was announced by the Scottish Funding Council, which oversees colleges and universities, in Holyrood on March 19.
The probe was ordered months after a £35 million deficit emerged in Dundee University’s finances.
The principal, Iain Gillespie, and other senior management subsequently left, staff went on strike and more than 600 jobs were put in jeopardy.
Who is the woman in charge of looking into Dundee’s handling of the saga?
Recent times
Most recently, Ms Gillies – who is from Dundee – was principal at Glasgow Caledonian University, leaving in 2022 after joining in 2006.
In that time, the university expanded with a New York campus which ran into its own problems.
Loans worth more than £26 million were made from the university to the college but in 2023 it was admitted that the project had not reached its potential and was sold off.
Mr Gillespie, while at Dundee University, was criticised for running up large travel bills with expensive foreign hotel trips.
And in 2016, it was reported Ms Gillies spent more on hotels in the previous year than any other university boss in Britain.
She earned £226,000 in 2016-17, accounts show.
Glasgow Caledonian, at the time, said Ms Gillies “maximises the value of each business trip with a full schedule of engagements to further the interests of the university and Scotland”.
She had the second highest list of air travel bills too.
Early career
Her career began when she graduated from Aberdeen University in 1976 with a BSc in Physiology and a teaching diploma. She was the first in her family to go to university.
She went on to graduate from Nottingham University before beginning a research career in 1978 in the government’s department of education.
Her academic career took her to Nottingham where she ended up as a vice chancellor in 2001.
She was worked in San Francisco on AIDS research, at the World Health Organization and at Harvard in the US.
She was made a CBE in the 2013 New Year Honours list for services to education and public health.
Beyond academia, she chairs the board of The Circle, a charity founded by Annie Lennox to promote gender equality, women’s economic opportunities and to reduce gender-based violence globally.
She is also on the board of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Scottish Lunchtime Theatre: A Play, A Pie & A Pint.
Ms Gillies was announced as lead investigator during a meeting of Holyrood’s education committee.
Committee member Michael Marra, a Dundee-based Labour MSP, described her during the session as a “very eminent individual”.
He added: “She is a good Dundonian as well as someone who has led in the sector.”
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