Professor Chris McConville is the Deputy Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation in the College of Science, Engineering & Health at RMIT University in Melbourne, a position he has held since 2016, and where he has responsibility for building research capability and improving research quality and outputs across these key areas.  He was previously Professor of Experimental Physics at The University of Warwick, UK and Director of the Science City Research Alliance (SCRA), between the Universities of Warwick and Birmingham (2011-15), where he holds Visiting Chairs in Physics at both Universities.  After receiving his PhD from Warwick in 1985, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Fritz Haber Institüt in Berlin, and at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New York.  He rejoined Warwick in 1990 and was subsequently promoted to Professor in 2003 and appointed as Professor of Experimental Physics in 2006.  He has over 35-years of experience studying surfaces, interfaces, and epitaxial growth of materials systems as diverse as metal alloys, III-V semiconductors, III-nitrides and semiconducting oxides.  He has raised the equivalent of over $25 million AUD in competitive research grants from research agencies, industry, government, and the EU, and published over 255 papers and several book chapters.  These publications have attracted over 7,000 citations, for an h-index of 54, and he has graduating 34 PhD students.  In 1998 he was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and in 2008 was the recipient of the Institute of Physics and British Vacuum Council’s Senior Prize and John Yarwood Memorial Medal, “In recognition of distinguished contributions to the study of surface and interface properties of compound semiconductors”.