Rate My Professor Frances Bowen

Professor Frances Bowen is the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex, having taken up the role on 1 August 2025. Internationally recognised for her research in corporate environmental strategy, she has over 30 years of experience in higher education across the UK, Canada, the USA and Singapore. She joined Essex from Queen Mary University of London, where she served as Vice-Principal and Executive Dean for Humanities and Social Sciences. Prior to that, she was Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Social Sciences at the University of East Anglia and later also Pro-Vice-Chancellor for International. She previously held the position of Dean of the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary and was the UK’s first Professor of Strategy in Society.

Professor Bowen earned degrees at the University of Oxford, Northeastern University in the USA, and the University of Bath, where she completed her PhD in strategic management. She progressed through senior academic appointments at the University of Sheffield and the University of Calgary in Canada, and has held senior visiting fellowships at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at the University of Oxford and at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Since the mid-1990s, her research has addressed business responses to climate change, corporate water strategies and corporate greenwashing. She has served as Division Chair within the Academy of Management (USA) and as President of GRONEN, the leading European business sustainability academic association. Professor Bowen is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She has advised regulators and government departments on corporate environmental behaviours and has served on various boards in education, technology transfer and environmental policy.