Richard Heller is Emeritus Professor at the Universities of Newcastle, Australia and Manchester, UK. He was Director of The Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Newcastle, and consultant physician at the John Hunter Hospital. Then as Professor of Public Health in Manchester he set up the Universitys first online masters degree. He founded and coordinated Peoples-uni to build Public Health capacity in developing countries at low cost, through online learning. His recent open access book is The Distributed University for Sustainable Higher Education.