16 Facts About Margaret Sheil

Margaret Mary Sheil is an Australian academic and the Vice Chancellor of Queensland University of Technology.

Margaret Sheil was born in Goulburn, New South Wales in August 1961.

Margaret Sheil was promoted to Professor of Chemistry in 2000, the first female chemistry professor in Australia, before becoming dean of science in 2001.

Also in this role, Margaret Sheil sought to increase research funding for women researchers, and has been acknowledged for her efforts, for keeping women in research and attracting Indigenous Australians to academia.

Professor Margaret Sheil was Provost of the University of Melbourne, from 2012 to 2017.

Margaret Sheil was appointed to the role of Vice-Chancellor of Queensland University of Technology in February 2018.

Professor Margaret Sheil is a member of the Advisory Council of the CSIRO Science Industry Endowment Fund, a member of the Clunies Ross Awards Committee of ATSE and the Australia Indonesia Centre.

In 2016, Professor Margaret Sheil joined the Board on the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation and the ATSE Board.

Margaret Sheil has previously been a member of the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council, a member of the University Advisory Board for Coursera, the National Research Infrastructure Council, the Cooperative Research Centre Programme and served as an Education Specialist on the Board of the Australian National Selection Commission for UNESCO.

Professor Margaret Sheil gave the 2014 Diana Temple Memorial Lecture at the University of Sydney charting her own experiences and life history against the backdrop of the changing constraints and opportunities that applied to women during those decades.

Professor Margaret Sheil has been a recipient of the Morrison Lecture, for her contribution to mass spectrometry in Australia, and was a finalist in the AFR 100 women of Influence for 2012.

Margaret Sheil is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, and was made an inaugural fellow of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Mass Spectrometry in February 2014.

Margaret Sheil was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in May 2021.

Margaret Sheil has recently been criticised for her leadership as vice-chancellor at Queensland University of Technology, which educates more than 52,000 students each year and employs 12,000 staff.

Margaret Sheil was the highest paid Queensland university VC in 2020 with a package worth at least $1.2m.

Professor Margaret Sheil has gained attention recently for her support of Queensland University of Technology's decision to remove all references to the word "merit" from its hiring policy, claiming that such terminology never achieves its stated goals and preferring instead to move towards a more "inclusive suitability assessment".