Staff Profile
Dr Rachel Sparks
Head of Faculty Strategic Implementation
Rachel is Head of Strategic Implementation & Change for Science Agriculture & Engineering (SAgE) Faculty. The Strategic Implementation and Change team develop and deliver strategic activities aligned with our SAgE faculty priorities, from scoping and planning through to development and delivery.
Rachel was previously the Strategic Project Manager for SAgE developing, managing, and monitoring the implementation of a variety of strategic projects on behalf of the SAgE Faculty to support the fulfilment of the Faculty and University vision and strategy. A substantive part of this role was to also lead and manage the Research Project Managers based within SAgE.
Rachel joined the University in 2019 as the Not-Equal Network Manager in the School of Computing. She has a background in Physics, having completed her BSc(Hons) in Physics & Astrophysics at Keele University and PhD in theoretical physics at Lancaster University. Following completion of her PhD Rachel went on to manage the Centre for NanoScale Science and Technology at Flinders University, South Australia. This centre hosts researchers across multiple disciplines enabling Rachel to expand her interests into other areas of science. She is also the former Grants Manager at the BP International Centre for Advanced Materials and has carried out Postdoctoral fellowships at Tomsk State University (Russia) and University of Nice Sophia Antipolis (France) utilizing her expertise in the areas of molecular electronics and astrophysics. Prior to joining Newcastle University, Rachel was the Research Proposal Editor for the School of Engineering at Stanford University (USA). In her broad array of roles across the globe, she has managed projects from small group ventures up to multimillion dollar collaborative programs (both industry and academic).