Duncan Ross

I started Impact HE in 2026, after ten years as chief data officer at Times Higher Education and a spell as global head of research at Newsweek. Before that I worked in data science at Teradata and Experian, which is a slightly unusual route into higher education. But it does mean I tend to start with the data, and ask what it can actually tell us.

At THE I designed the Impact Rankings, now the Sustainability Impact Ratings, and was responsible for developing the World University Rankings. I also built a series of specialist rankings, covering interdisciplinary science (with the Schmidt Science Fellows), Sub-Saharan Africa and US colleges (with the Wall Street Journal). At Newsweek I launched America’s Best Colleges for Women.

Alongside the day job, I co-chaired the Rankings, Ratings and Assessments Action Group of the UN Higher Education Sustainability Initiative. There we brought the main international rankings agencies together to agree how their systems should reflect the SDGs. I also co-founded DataKind UK, a charity that helps other charities make better use of their data, and chaired it until 2020.