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Emeritus Professor Robert Cormack (born 1946, Blantyre, Scotland) retired in late 2009 after an illustrious career in higher education, most notably at Queen’s University, Belfast where his service spanned the troubles in Northern Ireland. He became a leading specialist and author on equal opportunities, discrimination and public policy in Northern Ireland. He retired as principal of UHI Millennium Institute, the prospective University of the Highlands and Islands in the north of Scotland, taking it to the final stages in the process for university title and achieving taught degree awarding powers. He served as principal from 2001 to 2009.

Professor Cormack was educated in Scotland at Montrose Academy, the University of Aberdeen and in the United States at Brown University. In 1973 he was appointed to a lectureship in sociology at Queen’s University, Belfast. He was awarded a personal chair in 1994. He served as dean of the faculty of economics and social sciences and latterly as pro-vice-chancellor from 1995 to 2001.

With his colleague, Professor Robert Osborne, Professor Cormack undertook much of the early research on the differences in education and employment between the two communities in Northern Ireland. This led to major changes in fair employment legislation and in the funding of Catholic schools. He was co-director of the Centre for Research on Higher Education – a joint research centre of Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Ulster.

He has a long list of public and professional appointments to his name, including work in Europe dealing with issues such as globalisation and the universities; under-represented groups in higher education; the contribution of higher education to tolerance in European society, and the "brain drain." For two years, he was a Council of Europe member contracted by the World Bank to advise on the restructuring of higher education after the Kosovo war.

Professor Cormack was a member of the Joint Information Systems Committee; member of the Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education; Trustee of the Ireland Chair of Poetry; member of the Board of Governors of Stranmillis University College; chair of the Belfast Citizens Advice Bureaux, and worked with the Council of Europe.

Professor Cormack became principal of UHI Millennium Institute, the prospective University of the Highlands and Islands, in 2001. Under his leadership, UHI achieved taught degree awarding powers in 2008 and reached the final stages in the process for university title. He received one of the first honorary fellowships awarded by the University of the Highlands and Islands, for his contribution to its realisation, from its first ever Chancellor, HRH The Princess Royal, in 2012.

In 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, on which he served as a Trustee from 2012 to 2016. Cape Breton University awarded him a Doctor of Letters in 2009, and the same year the University of Edinburgh awarded him a Doctor honoris causa. Professor Cormack served on the Court of Queen Margaret University from 2010 to 2016, and was appointed a Trustee of the David Hume Institute in 2016. In 2015, as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations, the British Educational Research Association (BERA) compiled a set of 40 landmark studies that have had a significant impact on educational policy, practice, research methodology and/or theory over the past 40 years. BERA named Cormack and Osborne, ‘Religion, Education and Employment’ as one of those studies.