Jackie is a Careers and Employability Consultant here in the OU Careers and Employability services. She currently has a focus on Diversity and recent work has included developing the CES support for Student carers and for students identifying as neurodivergent, along with linking specifically with the Access team and students. She has been at the OU since 2017, initially working as the Consultant in the WELS faculty. Prior to this, experience includes working at the University of Derby on Enterprise projects and in the Business school, and several years delivering careers advice and guidance in different settings including schools and colleges, prisons, and with adults seeking work or a career change.

Jacquie is a Departmental Co-ordinator in the Faculty of Arts.  She is also an OU student working towards a BA Honours degree in Classical Studies.

James Dooley is Lecturer in Music Technology at The Open University. He has a particular interest in sound synthesis and a research focus that explores the transformative impact digital technologies have on musical creativity. He is the lead author of the Music short course Computer audio: sound and music in the digital world.

James is co-founder of Universal Simulation and an Open University graduate. He won the OU Student Entrepreneurship competition for his most recent venture and is currently participating in the Santander Emerging Entrepreneurs Programme to grow his business. James currently supports start-ups in haptics, VR and cybersecurity, expanding companies with customers in 12 countries across five continents.

I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Voluntary Sector Leadership, which is part of the Open University Business School. In my career I have taught in various disciplines, including Geography, Politics and Social Policy. I am interested in the ‘third’ or voluntary sector in its widest sense but also specialise in researching the role of voluntary organisations in delivering public services, as well as the difference leadership makes. I have only been at the OU since March, so am still getting to know the institution, but I love it when I meet people who have invariably had a fantastic experience studying with the OU. I tweet on @JamesRees_CVSL.

After being awarded his PhD in 2002, James spent some time in industry working as a systems engineer before then joining The Open University (OU) as a Curriculum Manager in the Physics Department (now known as the School of Physical Sciences). He is now a senior manager for the OpenSTEM Labs.

The OpenSTEM Labs challenge the traditional STEM teaching model of students and tutors being collocated in a lab during ‘office hours’. The laboratory connects students to instrumentation, data and equipment for practical enquiries over the internet, where distance is no longer a barrier and where access can be available 24 hours a day.

The experiences a student might encounter range from data driven interactive experiments through to connecting with real, high grade, equipment. There are even two telescopes sited in an international observatory complex on Tenerife.

James Warren is a Senior Lecturer in Engineering and Innovation and works on the Survey Management Working Group, which has been working on the new SEaM (Student Experience on a Module) student survey that all students get each presentation on every module. The working group liaises with a large range of stakeholders in order to try and progress the survey and make it better for users but especially for OU students.

Jan Haywood completed his PhD at the University of Liverpool in 2013, before teaching Classics and Ancient History at the University of Liverpool and the University of Leicester. He joined the Open University as a Lecturer in Classical Studies in January 2017. His research focuses on Greek historiography and its literary contexts, and he’s particularly interested in the early historian Herodotus, who engages with many other textual sources, from the poet Stesichorus to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. His research interests also include Greek drama, especially tragedy, notably the way that tragedians interact with and shape wider social-political discourses.

Jan is a Marie Curie Research Fellow from Germany and has worked at the OU since March of this year. Jan’s research is into surface activity on today’s Mars, focused on sediment mass movements triggered by surface volatiles, and on so-called ‘dust devils’, which are sediment entrained whirlwinds. He began at the Institut für Planetologie in Münster, Germany, in March 2015, before moving to England to join a geological engineering company. For Jan’s studies he works intensively with remote sensing datasets from NASA and ESA missions to Mars, as well as laboratory work with a Martian pressure chamber. He has also undertaken comparative fieldworks in the deserts of China and Morocco. Jan has a young daughter (9 months old) and in his free time enjoys listening to rock music, cooking and hiking.

TBD

Dr 

Janette Wallace has been an Associate Lecturer with the Open University for over eleven years, tutoring on science modules from level 1 up to Masters level. She has enjoyed getting to know students who are new to the OU and are often coming back to Science and studying after ‘years’ away. She enjoys aiding students in learning new study skills and gaining a new enthusiasm for science. Working with level 3 students is also very rewarding as she often tutors students in their final module – with great satisfaction the students leave her with a degree and graduation ceremony to look forward to.
In her spare time she likes baking – which means, due to time constraints, she mainly salivates over recipe books, watches GBBO and sometimes bakes a cake. To counteract this, she tries to keep fit with a regular British military fitness boot camp sessions and weekly tap dancing lessons!

Jeni is a Positive Psychology & Team Development Coach here at the OU and helps to support the ‘human’ element and wellbeing for individuals and within teams to improve productivity, creativity and performance.

Jeni's expertise lies in positive psychology or ‘the science of human flourishing’, a relatively new perspective on team growth, personal and organisation change, wellbeing and wholeheartedness.

She helps individuals to discover and amplify the best of themselves, and to apply their strengths with energy and focus, leading to greater creativity and productivity, as well as better outcomes and personal fulfilment. Jeni's approach is quite different to what you may be used to and will bring her unique style and alternative view to each challenge tackled.

Jeni has an MSc in Applied Positive Psychology and is a qualified Appreciative Inquiry Practitioner, Transformational Coach, Accredited Group Coach and Agile Team Coach.

Jennifer Saunders has worked as a Senior Student Recruitment and Support Advisor within the Law Student Support Team since May 2019. Prior to that she worked in Student Recruitment so she has been able to transfer the skills that she’d developed there to help students further in her current role.

Based in Coventry, Jennifer Wharton has recently completed her fourth and final year, and will graduate in October. 

Jennifer began studying Law in 2013, with the aim of changing career after running her small business for a number of years. After starting her Law degree, Jennifer found the Open University Law Society (OULS) and developed a passion for mooting. As a result, she has competed in internal and external competitions over the past three years.

Jennifer is now Mistress of the Moots for OULS, and support OULS members through mooting events and competitions.

Outside of her studies she volunteers for her local Citizens Advice and a local animal rescue group and can often be found leading lost pet searches around her local area.

Jenny started her working life as an operating theatre practitioner, she went on to study one of the UK’s first nursing degree programmes. Since then she has been a Sister in intensive care, a community Nursing Sister, worked for NHS Direct, taught in her local Further Education College and undertaken her dream job (coordinating organ donations), which she described as difficult, emotional but incredible. She has also completed two master’s degrees (one at the OU) and appreciates how hard it can be to balance family, study and work.

Her background led her into working for the OU, where she has been a tutor for Access, Level 1 and Level 2 Health and Social care modules (mainly within the pre-registration nursing programme). She is an Associate Lecturer for Y032, YXM130, K101, KYN237.

Jenny loves her garden (it’s her ‘me’ space), sewing and strolling along the prom at her local beach.

Jeremy Wilcock is a Staff Tutor in the School of Education, Childhood, Youth and Sport, currently working with Associate Lecturers who teach on the Childhood and Youth programme. He is also an Associate Lecturer in the School of Language and Applied Linguistics, teaching on English language modules. Jeremy joined the OU in 2005 and for most of that time has been based in the Cardiff office. He has a particular interest in how we use language to create supportive relationships in distance education.
Outside of work, Jeremy enjoys being a children’s football coach at his local team, playing cue sports and spending time on the coast

Jessica is a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Fitness at the Open University.

She has worked as an academic at the university since October 2011. Prior to that she worked as an associate lecturer at the Open University and as a lecturer in sport and exercise science within the FE sector.

Jess is a senior lecturer in Classical Studies at The Open University. She is the chair of A330 Myth in the Greek and Roman worlds, and deputy chair of A111 Discovering the arts and humanities.

Dr Jill McLachlan is a passionate education advocate, drawing on her work as a primary school teacher to inform her multiple roles at the Open University.

Jill started at the university as a mature student in 2000, achieving her MEd and then her EdD (and she is still studying now!). She became an Associate Lecturer in 2008, using her own experiences as a distance learner and teacher to support other OU students, especially those training to become Teaching Assistants.

Jim is a senior lecturer in forensic psychology in the School of Psychology and Counselling. He has worked on many OU psychology modules, both undergraduate and postgraduate, including in recent years co-producing the level 2 undergraduate module DD210 ‘Living psychology: from the everyday to the extraordinary’ and the postgraduate module DD802 ‘Investigating forensic psychology’. Jim is also currently the Deputy Director of Teaching for Psychology and Counselling and Qualification Lead for the BSc (Hons) Psychology degree (Q07).

Jitka Vseteckova’s role in the Faculty of Health and Social Care in the Open University is multi-faceted and enables her to be involved in research, teaching, supervision and external collaborations. Her research is oriented in four main directions:

• Health policy and planning: evaluation and improvement of health service delivery; and addressing the future health needs of communities.
• Public health / health of citizens and populations domain: improvement of outcomes for elderly persons & evidence base used for improving patient / student outcomes in health care.
• Education and improvement of skills, specifically in mental-health professionals.
• Development of evidence base in several areas of health and social care.

Joan has been working within the Open University Faculty of Business and Law for many years, on both the MBA and UG business programmes. She studied Public Policy in the United States for her UG degree and then worked with an immigration law journal and consumer rights services magazine in Washington, D.C. before moving to the U.K. Gaining an MBA from London Business School, she then worked in information technology/media management consulting and venture capital before joining the Open University. She has tutored on the MBA programme. She also has a textile design degree, studied part-time over seven years.

Joan has three sons and lives in Hertfordshire, where she likes to walk her springer spaniel and sings in a women’s barbershop chorus.

Further info coming soon. 

John Allen is Professor of Economic Geography in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Professor John Butcher is the Director, Access, Open and Cross-Curricular Innovation and is currently seconded to the PVC-Student office from the WELS faculty. He recently published a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute, entitled: ‘Unheard: the voices of part-time adult learners’. He has been an OU student himself, gaining an advanced diploma in Educational Management and a Masters and doctorate in Education while teaching full-time. He also tutored for 16 years in the Arts faculty.

John has six children (a fact that continues to surprise him) and now three grandchildren, he supports West Ham and used to like dancing to The Smiths.

John Domingue first joined the OU in the 1980s as a PhD student within an AI lab in the Psychology Department - the goal of his PhD was to build an AI Tutor to teach AI programming. In the 1980s and 1990s he taught AI on several OU courses through summer schools and as an OU Tutor.

Having joined the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) when it was setup as a technology focused R&D in 1995, he now with the holds the position of Professor of Computer Science there and served as KMi Director from 2015 to 2022. He has contributed over 240 refereed articles in fields such as semantics, AI, the Web, distributed ledgers, and eLearning and is the President of STI International, an organization specializing in semantics and AI and responsible for the ESWC conference series.

John has spent most of his working life in R&D for a manufacturer of aerospace and automotive components. He started teaching on OU residential schools back in the 1980s, and over time has gradually found himself sucked more and more into the OU. He became an OU tutor in the ’90s, working on modules covering Engineering, Arts and IT subjects. He is now a full-time member of the School of Computing and Communication, where he has worked on a range of modules. He is also the Director of Teaching for the School of Computing and Communications in the STEM Faculty.

Outside of the OU, he’s obsessed with cricket, his bass guitar and electronic gadgets. He also has impeccable taste in jumpers & spectacles.

His favourite thing about the OU is the students – especially seeing new ones grow in confidence and gradually improve their assignment marks as they work through their studies.

Jon Pike joined The Open University in 1998, as Staff Tutor in the South East Region. His main area of teaching is Political Philosophy, on the course AA311 Reading political philosophy: Machiavelli to Mill and on the MA in Philosophy. He is currently writing two books. One is on distributive justice and equality, centred on an analysis of the socialist slogan 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need'. The other is a text book on political philosophy. His research interests include Marx and the philosophical problems involved in various forms of political action, the theories of rights and their application, and the history of political philosophy more generally.

Jon Rosewell chairs the level 1 module ‘Technologies in practice (TM129)’ which is an introduction to some topics in computing and IT: robotics, computer networking, and the Linux operating system. He has also studied with the OU and knows how it feels on the other side!

Jonathan Gibson is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the OU. He loves reading, teaching and writing about all kinds of literature. Over the years, he has done a lot of research on the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, studying not just plays and poems by writers like Shakespeare and Donne, but also manuscript letters. Two of his particular interests are Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh. One of his best research experiences was going to Hatfield House to spend a few weeks reading Elizabeth I’s extraordinary love letters to the Duke of Alençon.  

Professor Josie Fraser joined The Open University in March 2017 but describes her interest in the University and its mission as 'long-term' after being a tutor on an OU MSc course back in the early 2000s. This was an experience that influenced her teaching for many years. Josie was previously Executive Dean of the Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics before taking up the Deputy Vice-Chancellor role from 1 January 2019.

Jude Bennett is a trainee Learning and Teaching Librarian, and completed her Masters degree in July 2018. She works on the library helpdesk answering students’ queries, as well as delivering online training sessions to students, and working with module teams to make sure that students get the most out of their library. She also gets to indulge her creative side by creating videos for the OU Library Youtube channel. At home Jude enjoys baking and decorating cakes, much to the enjoyment of her colleagues who regularly find baked goods in the staff room.

Biography not available.