Background
Sir Gordon was born in Street Andrews, Fife and brought up in Inverness.
Sir Gordon was born in Street Andrews, Fife and brought up in Inverness.
He attended Inverness Royal Academy, followed by the University of Glasgow, where he studied Engineering. He had a distinguished career and completed his Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.
He served as President and Vice-Chancellor of Queen"s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, from 1986 to 1997. He was knighted in 1994 for his services to higher education. Among the outstanding successes of his thirteen-year Vice-Chancellorship were the realisation of his personal vision for the outreach to the south and west of Northern Ireland.
This became reality with the opening of the Queen"s campus in Armagh in 1995.
In the same year he presided over the celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of Queen"son He spent some time at the University of Minnesota as a Harkness Fellow and a visiting Professor at the University of Texas.
In 1967 he moved to Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and from 1971 to 1986 was Professor of Chemical Engineering and Head of the Department of the Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. In 1984 he served a term as president of the Institution of Chemical Engineers.
He was President of QUA in 1989.
Gordon was the son of Victor Beattie Beveridge and Elizabeth Fairbairn Grieve. Engineering in the 80s, Edinburgh. Targeted at school leavers who were considering one of the branches of engineering as a career, this exhibition for the Council of Engineering Institutions was held at the Royal Museum of Scotland for three months.
Exhibits ranged from coalface-cutting machines to needles for optical surgery.
Among his many posts, he was a Fellow and an Officer of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Companion of the Institute of Management. He was also a member of the National Economic Development Office (Nedo) Chemicals Economic Development Committee and chairman of its Petrochemical Sector Working Group. He was Chairman of the Governments Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC) 1995-1998, a member of the Board of the Northern Ireland Growth Challenge and a Director of University Bookshop Limited, the Northern Quality Centre and the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre.
He also served as a member of the Council of the Open University, as Director and Chairman of Navan at Armagh Management Limited, which runs the Navan Fort complex.
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