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Jill has been Professor of Production Economics at the University of Huddersfield since January 2015, and Dean of Huddersfield Business School since October 2016. She started her career at British Aerospace, Warton Division as a Senior Commercial Apprentice, before moving to academia in 1988 becoming a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and finally Reader in Production Economics at Lancaster University. She has therefore been involved in teaching, research and leadership roles in higher education for more than 30 years.

Jill has an established and excellent record in teaching, and this is recognised in the award of a Pilkington Teaching Award from Lancaster University in 1991, a National Teaching Fellowship (NTFS) in 2011, and Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy. She was recently invited to speak on  ‘Innovation & evolution: delivering education in the new normal’ at the Annual Conference on Learning, Teaching, and  Student Experience, Chartered Association of Business Schools, Belfast (2022).

Jill’s core research examines organisational efficiency using frontier estimation techniques.

Jill has recently started to apply frontier estimation techniques in the context of the banking sector and in particular in comparing the Islamic and conventional banking business models. She has growing number of publications on this subject in internationally recognised journals, and has presented papers (including by invitation) on this subject at various conferences, and has been on the scientific/organising committees for various conferences in this area including the Islamic Banking and Finance conference at Lancaster University (2014), and the 9^th Foundation of Islamic Finance Conference at Lancaster University (2017).

From a combination of widely-cited journal publications and three influential books, Jill has gained a particularly prominent national and international research reputation in education economics. Her early work, including the book Performance Indicators in Higher Education (1990), influenced the manner in which league tables are constructed, from an output approach to the now standard value-added approach. As a consequence, Jill has worked on efficiency issues with, for example, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (D/BIS), the European Union, the Kuwait Institute of Scientific Research, the Swedish National Audit Office, and The Royal Society/British Academy. She has also been invited to speak on education efficiency at a number of venues including the Swedish National Audit Office (2010), the Beijing Forum (2012), Beijing Normal University (2013), the Annual International Conference of the Association of Higher Education Researchers, Moscow (2013), Efficiency in Education Workshop, The Work Foundation, London (2014), the 5th Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis, Catholic University Porto (2015), the Centre for Higher Education Studies, Institute of Education, University College London (2016), the Meeting of the Economics of Education Association, Murcia (2017),  the Workshop on Education Economics, TIER, Maastricht University (2017), and the Workshop on Public Financing of Catalan Universities I, University of Barcelona (2018).

In addition she has organised or been on the organising committee for a number of workshops and conferences in this area including: the 2^nd Workshop on Efficiency in Education, the Work Foundation, London, UK (19th to 20th September 2014); the 5^th Workshop on Efficiency in Education, Budapest, Hungary (October 19^th – 20^th 2017); The OR Society Annual Conference (OR60), Stream organiser ‘DEA and Productivity’, Lancaster University, UK (11^th-13^th September 2018); the 17^th European Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis, Católica Porto Business School, Porto, Portugal (27^th – 30^th June 2022); and the 8^th International Workshop on Efficiency in Education, Health and other Public Services, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy (8^th – 9^th September 2022).

Jill has been Deputy Editor of the journals Regional Economics (1989-1992) and Education Economics (1992-2002), and is on the editorial board of the journals Education Economics and Higher Education Quarterly. She has edited special issues including of the Journal of the Operational Research Society on Efficiency in Education (2017) and of International Transactions in Operational Research on Efficiency in Education, Health and other Public Services (2020).

• Production economics (measuring efficiency)