Prof. Pius Coxwell Achanga is the Vice Chancellor of Mountains of the Moon University, having been appointed to the said position in September 2022. Prior to this, he chaired a Taskforce appointed by the Hon. Minister of Education and Sports in January 2019, to oversee the transition of MMU from a private Chartered University to Public status, when the Memorandum of Agreement was signed between Government and MMU in January 2022, for the takeover of MMU, as a Public University.
In October 2019, Dr. Achanga was appointed Adjunct Professor of Higher Education Management at the Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management (GITAM), India. From 2017, he was appointed as an Associate Fellow in the training of doctoral programmes at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa.
Professor Achanga holds a PhD in Manufacturing Systems; and an MSc. in Manufacturing Management and Information Systems, from Cranfield University-UK, a Bachelor of Business Information Technology from the University of Hull-UK, a Postgraduate Certificate in Education from Canterbury Christ Church University, UK and has attended a number of continuous professional development trainings.
Previously, Professor Achanga served as the Director of Quality Assurance and Accreditation at the National Council for Higher Education (NCHE), where he oversaw the licensure and establishment, planning, development, and strategic guidance of all Higher Education Training Institutions in Uganda. He worked at NCHE for over 12 years in various capacities, including institutional and programme accreditation, development of Minimum Standards, and the Monitoring and Evaluation of Higher Education Institutions, among others.
Before joining NCHE, he was a Research Associate at the Institute for Manufacturing, School of Engineering, University of Cambridge-UK, where he led in managing of a £500 million DEFRA sponsored project for waste reduction in food processing SMEs in East Anglia. He was also an Industrial Fellow at Rolls-Royce Plc. Professor Achanga has authored a number of scholarly articles, with his ‘Critical Success Factor for Lean Manufacturing’, cited over 1,500 times.