Professor Mike Saks

Professor Mike Saks is Emeritus Professor at the University of Suffolk and Visiting Professor at the University of Lincoln, and the University of Westminster, UK, and the University of Toronto, Canada. He received his doctorate in Sociology at the London School of Economics and is a Fellow of the Institute of Directors, the Institute of Knowledge Exchange, the Research Council of Complementary Medicine and the Royal Society of Arts. He was Provost and Chief Executive at University Campus Suffolk (UCS), Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Lincoln and Dean of Faculty of Health and Community Studies at De Montfort University – after contributing to the Schools of Business, Law, Public Administration and Social Sciences there. He was a long-term member of the Board at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance in London, of which he is now an honorary Fellow, having previously been on the Executive of the University of Essex and the University of East Anglia, which owned UCS.

He has published extensively on health, professions and regulation with some two dozen books, the latest of which include Professions and Professional Service Firms (2018), Professional Health Regulation in the Public Interest (2018), Support Workers and the Health Professions in International Perspective (2020), Professions: A Key Idea for Business and Society(2021), Responsible Leadership: Essential to the Achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2023) and The National Health Services of Western Europe (2024).

He has a strong enterprise profile in the private and public sectors. In the UK, he is a member of the Innovation Council, along with CEOs of major multinational corporations and has been a chair/member of many National Health Service committees. Internationally, he has conducted large-scale funded research projects and advised governments and professional bodies, as well as chairing two significant charities alongside other bodies in the health field. He was recently President of the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee on Professional Groups and Vice President of the parallel ISA Research Committee on Health, with members drawn from some thirty-five countries, and is currently a senior adviser on leadership to the United Nations.