Profile
Professor Rebecca Cain is the Dean of the School of Design and Creative Arts and a member of the University Executive Board at Loughborough University.
Her previous senior leadership roles at Loughborough include Acting Dean and Associate Pro-Vice Chancellor for Vibrant and Inclusive Communities. In this capacity, she contributed to the University Leadership Group, driving forward Loughborough’s ten-year strategy for Vibrant and Inclusive Communities across research, education, campus life, and external partnerships. She has also served as Associate Dean for Research & Innovation and Associate Dean for Enterprise.
Professor Cain has held board-level positions within the Design Research Society for 14 years, most recently as a member of the International Advisory Council. From 2020 to 2023, she served as Chair and Vice-Chair of the Executive Board, where she championed diversity and inclusion and fostered the development of new international communities in design research through the establishment of special interest groups. She is a member of the Learning and Research Committee at the Design Museum, a Fellow of the RSA, and serves on both the EPSRC Peer Review College and the UKRI Talent Panel College. She is currently Co-Director of the Business of Fashion and Textile Technology (BFTT) Programme and a founding board member of the DRS Special Interest Group on Design for Wellbeing, Health and Happiness.
In her research and leadership, Professor Cain advocates for the transformative potential of design and creativity in enhancing human and planetary well-being. She promotes creative leadership in research and education and has over 20 years of experience building diverse, interdisciplinary teams—spanning design, engineering, architecture, science, social science, psychology, business, philosophy, and health—to address complex societal challenges. She has mentored over 30 doctoral and early career researchers and founded the HOME Centre for Doctoral Training, a transdisciplinary research centre that uses creative methods to reimagine homelessness through lived experience.
Before joining Loughborough, Professor Cain spent 12 years at the Warwick Manufacturing Group (University of Warwick), where she was an EPSRC Fellow and led the Experiential Engineering Research Group. There, she developed a distinctive approach to embedding human-centred thinking within engineering culture, integrating experimentation, creative methodologies, industry collaboration, and citizen and stakeholder engagement.
