Robert James "Roy" CrawfordCNZM (1948 or 1949 – 23 June 2016) was a university administrator and mechanical engineering academic, whose primary research interest has been in the mechanical properties and processing behaviour of plastics.[1]
From 1989 to 1999, he was Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the School of Mechanical and Process Engineering at the Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. He was also responsible for establishing the Polymer Processing Research Centre at Queen's University. This centre included the Research Group on rotational moulding of plastics, which he also established. From 1999 to 2001, he was Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
From 2001 to 2004, Crawford was Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research at Queen's University Belfast. From January 2005 until December 2014, he was Vice Chancellor of the University of Waikato in New Zealand.[2][3]
Crawford published nine books and about 300 papers,[2] and was a member of numerous government panels and research grant committees in the United Kingdom. He was an expert in the rotational moulding of plastics, and gave keynote lectures, courses and seminars on this subject all over the world. During his tenure at Queen's in the 1990s, his school improved its rating in the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) from Grade 3 in the 1992 RAE to the top Grade of 5* in 1996. He was a member of the 2001 RAE Panel for assessing Mechanical Engineering in all universities in the United Kingdom.
