Grahame Bilbow has been Director of the Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning (CETL) since May 2013. Prior to this, he was an Assistant Director of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in the UK, with responsibility for the Arts and Humanities. The HEA is the UK government funded agency responsible for the enhancement of teaching and learning quality at universities across the UK’s four nations. Immediately prior to that appointment, Grahame was First Secretary for Education at the British Embassy in Beijing for nearly four years, where he was responsible for bilateral educational programmes between Britain and China, as well as in Mongolia and North Korea.

Grahame has also spent many years living and working in Hong Kong (from 1989 to 2005), and he happily calls Hong Kong his ‘home away from home’. When he left Hong Kong in 2005, he was Head of the Department of English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he had worked for fifteen years. Grahame was promoted to Professor by the PolyU in 2001 on the basis of his research and publications in the areas of cross-cultural discourse analysis and intercultural communication. Over the years, he has also published many textbooks and textbook series in Hong Kong and mainland China, intended for a wide range of audiences ranging from primary to university level, as well as for professional audiences.

In more recent years, Grahame’s interests have increasingly turned to the quest for quality in teaching and learning in higher education internationally. His appointments at the Higher Education Academy and most recently at the University of Hong Kong’s Centre for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning are evidence of his commitment to this quest.

Grahame currently holds an honorary professorship conferred by the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong.