Registrar and Chief Operating Officer
Born and educated in Dublin, Niamh graduated from University College Dublin with an honours degree in Engineering. After graduating she spent two years employed by Queen’s University Belfast on a research studentship, undertaking industry sponsored applied research projects. She later qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant in the food industry where she worked prior to moving to the HE sector in Cornwall. Niamh is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. She qualified as a Chartered Director in 2022 and is a Fellow of the Institute of Directors.
Niamh Lamond is currently the Registrar and Chief Operating Officer at Swansea University, reporting to the Vice Chancellor and leading many of the professional services in the university. These include human resources, estates and campus services, marketing recruitment and international, digital services, strategic planning and transformation and Faculty professional services. University governance and legal services are also in her portfolio.
Before joining Swansea Niamh was the Chief Operating Officer at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. At Ulster she built a strong new team responsible for delivering the university’s core professional services including People and Culture, Estates and Campus Life, Finance, Digital Services, Student Administration and Marketing and Communications. This new team was formed as part of a wider university professional services change programme which Niamh sponsored and led. As well as delivering necessary structural change the programme led to more collaborative ways of working and established a staff and student focused culture working closely with the students and staff unions. During her time at Ulster Niamh had responsibility for delivering the new £365m Belfast campus development. This iconic campus was completed and fully opened in 2022.
Prior to Ulster University Niamh was the founding Chief Executive Officer and a Board Director of Falmouth Exeter Plus (FX Plus), a joint venture between Falmouth University and the University of Exeter. In this role she was responsible for the provision of a wide-ranging portfolio of shared professional services to the two universities across three campuses in Cornwall. Under Niamh’s leadership, the proactive engagement of professional services with academic staff and students drove improvements and innovation across services including library and academic skills, student services, IT, estates, capital building developments and campus services.
At FX Plus and in her previous role as Director of Finance and Resources at Falmouth University Niamh played a central role in the Combined Universities in Cornwall project which delivered a step change in higher education opportunities across Cornwall over 15 years. From its inception she was an architect of the partnership between Falmouth University and Exeter University which, over more than a decade of growth, jointly developed a £300M university campus at Penryn and delivered shared professional services enabling rapid growth in world class teaching and research.
For four years until July 2016 Niamh was a non-Executive Director of Wave Hub Limited, a 48 megawatt grid-connected offshore wave energy testing facility located off the Cornish coast. She was also a member of HEFCE’s strategic advisory committee on Leadership, Governance and Management for four years until 2011. She represented Northern Ireland on the national executive of the Association of Heads of University Administration up to December 2020.
Niamh was a Trustee of Cornwall’s primary theatre, The Cornwall Playhouse, for eight years until 2016, before moving to Northern Ireland and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
