Students in Focus
Connecting the dots: Fiona Richards on building UC’s global future
In February 2026, Dr Fiona Richards officially commenced as Chief Global Engagement Officer at the University of Canberra. It’s not her first time expanding a successful domestic offering into unexplored international markets, and in her first months on the job, she’s already discovered threads of international engagement embedded across the university. As she sees it, her role now is uniting each of these puzzle pieces to take Canberra’s university to the world.
Fiona began her career as an academic. With a PhD in tourism management, one of her very first jobs 20 years ago was lecturing at the University of Canberra.
In these early days, she spilt her time between roles in industry, before returning to teaching and research in the areas of business and tourism. It’s this experience on both sides of the industry that informed her deep understanding of how universities, academia and international education function.
It was while working at Charles Darwin University, that Fiona began her foray into international education.
“I was an academic and I got frustrated with chasing research funds. When the opportunity arose to the Manager of International Marketing and Recruitment, I saw the synergies between tourism – my background – and international education,” Fiona says.
“The flow of international students between countries is much like the flow of tourism between countries – you go to a travel agent to book a holiday, and you go to an international education agent to help you navigate student visas and choosing a university overseas. There are similar lead times, marketing strategies, investment types…the transition was easier than I expected.”
From there, her international education career has taken her across the world to the UK, India. Canada and Singapore, in both the public and private education sectors.
While working for Singapore-based, private equity-funded education group, A-Star, as the Group Sales Director, she would spend a month there and then a month in New York, managing their North American company commercial teams.
One of the companies she worked with, Summer Discovery, provided students in Years 10-12 with accredited “pre-university” summer holiday programs. Her role? Take the company international.
“I was helping bring a company that was 40 years old and very successful domestically in the U.S to an international market,” Fiona says.
“I had to create a whole international sales and marketing team – scaling up the business from a founder led company to a private equity owned, commercially focused team. Then, helped them penetrate the international market and start attracting international students.”
She credits this as one of the most exciting projects she’s had the chance to work on.
Fiona was in Singapore when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and she decided it was time to return home. She took up a role with private education provider, Navitas, before coming across the new Chief Global Engagement Officer position at the University of Canberra, where she saw broad scope, a solid grounding, and lots of opportunity.
“The role covers all aspects of international engagement, which really interested me. Since I started here, I’ve been discovering all the different pockets of international education and research taking place across the university,” Fiona says.
“I see my role, as bringing these threads together – bringing people together to share ideas and maximise the opportunities available to us.”
Fiona cites longstanding partnerships in China, helmed by the UC Faculty of Education and Faculty of Business, Government and Law. As well as the Faculty of Education’s highly successful partnership with Hanoi University, Vietnam, to deliver the Master of Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Foreign Language Teaching (FLT).
“When you look at all the international partnerships UC has, we really do punch above our weight for an institution our size – and the longevity of some of these partnerships… it’s very impressive,” Fiona says.
“While we don’t currently have these big international branch campuses like other universities, we're not starting from scratch. We have excellent relationships with our partners and a lot of credibility in many countries.”
For Fiona, thinking internationally and domestically don’t have to be siloed– each brings benefit to the other.
“I don't think international and domestic education are at opposite end of a spectrum. I think they complement each other,” Fiona says.
“The more globally connected we are as a university, the more valuable we are to domestic students because of the education and opportunities we can provide them – more study tours, more opportunities for exchange, an international curriculum and high achieving students from across the world studying alongside them as peers on our campus.”
“I did a semester abroad as my part of my undergrad, and that's what I think, put me on my path. In my career.”
As she begins the journey of unifying UC’s international presence, Fiona acknowledges the existing groundwork of countless others that have come before.