The Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Keele University has received an OBE in the 2025 New Year Honours list for services to education and to sustainability.

Professor Mark Ormerod has dedicated most of his working life to enhancing and promoting environmental sustainability and has an international profile for his leadership, advocacy and communication of sustainability, low carbon and clean technology issues.

Responsible for helping lead the University’s activities in sustainability and low carbon energy since 2008, Mark has been instrumental in helping to embed sustainability in all aspects of Keele's operations – including education, research, external engagement and partnerships and the campus and community – and in raising its profile. In 2021, Keele was awarded Global Sustainability Institution of the Year at the International Green Gown Awards, building on its success at the UK and Ireland Green Gown Awards earlier that year, and in 2018 the University won the Outstanding Sustainability Leadership Team Award.

Mark has a strong commitment to the local region, with both his parents and large extended family all being born and brought up in Staffordshire. He has a long-standing passion for equity, diversity and inclusion and widening participation in higher and further education going back almost 40 years and has worked extensively with under-represented communities during his career. This has included increasing awareness and engagement with science and sustainability issues, pre-environmental behaviour and environmental citizenship.

On being appointed an OBE, Mark said: "I am both delighted and humbled to receive an OBE. I feel very fortunate to have worked with lots of very talented and committed people throughout my career, who have provided inspiration and motivation to try to make a difference to education, research and the environment."

Mark has spent the last 32 years of his career working at Keele since joining as a lecturer in Physical Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 1992 where he studied, researched and taught for nine years, latterly as the University's Oppenheimer Fellow. In 1997 he was awarded a prestigious Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Advanced Research Fellowship and promoted to Professor of Clean Technology and Inorganic Materials Chemistry at Keele in recognition of his research achievements.

His original research interests centred on more environmentally friendly chemical processes, sustainable materials chemistry and clean technologies, in particular heterogeneous catalysis and fuel cells, publishing more than 150 highly cited papers. Mark’s research in sustainable materials and surface chemistry and clean chemical technologies, often working with industry, was internationally renowned and led to significant advances in the field.  

Mark was Head of Keele's Schools of Physical and Geographical Sciences, and Chemistry and Physics from 2003 to 2011, leading a period of strong growth and successful new programme development in the chemical, forensic and physical sciences and the geo/environmental sciences at Keele, including the start of Forensic Science at Keele in 2004. Mark was Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise from 2011 to 2015, and in 2015 became Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost at Keele, taking on responsibility for the academic leadership of the University.

Mark has been a member of many scientific and environmental sustainability national and international panels and advisory groups, including being a member of UK Research and Innovation’s Environmental Sustainability Advisory Group and the 2021 Research Excellence Framework Institutional Level Environment Panel.

More recently, Mark plays a key role in Keele's increasingly strong engagement with its partner colleges, including the new Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire Institute of Technology, due to open in 2025, which Keele is the university partner of, and is a member of Newcastle and Stafford Colleges Group Governing Body.

Professor Elaine Hay, a Professor of Community Rheumatology at Keele University, has also been recognised in this year's New Year Honours list, receiving an MBE for services to medical research.