Dr. Andrew Hodgers is the founder and President of IHRI and Principal Investigator of Unit 03 — Complex Systems and Space. His career integrates three decades of senior academic leadership in work-based learning at doctoral level with four decades of operational and strategic leadership across defence technology, tier-one multinational advisory, and transnational systems integration.

His academic career was built through his role as co-founder and Director of the Irish Centre for Work Based Learning — the Centre for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) — which he established alongside Nick Hodgers and Professor Noel Mulcahy as the Irish partner centre operating within Middlesex University's international Work-Based Learning network and its National Centre for Work Based Learning. The National Centre received the Queen's Anniversary Prize for excellence and innovation in 1996 — the most distinguished award in UK higher education — and was designated a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) by the Higher Education Funding Council for England in 2005, in recognition of its nationally leading work in work-based learning. As co-founder and Director, he co-developed and led the Global Executive Leadership postgraduate and doctoral programme, a flexible academic pathway designed for senior career professionals, and established CAPS as a substantive research and practice environment for executive doctoral candidates operating within the Middlesex academic framework.

He served as Ireland's Expert Partner in a two-year EU-funded transnational consortium — Work Based Learning: Learning from Europe — supported by the European Social Fund and the State of Brandenburg, working with partner institutions across Germany (Technische Hochschule Brandenburg), the United Kingdom (Middlesex University Institute for Work Based Learning), Finland (University of Jyväskylä), and Austria (Fachhochschule Joanneum) to design and implement work-based learning frameworks and capability programmes for industry in the Brandenburg region. He subsequently operated in an advisory capacity to a Malta-based higher education college, supporting its progression to Masters and Doctoral programme licence status and the design and introduction of three new programmes: two Masters degrees with associated Postgraduate Certificate and Postgraduate Diploma pathways, and a doctoral degree.

His commercial career spans three distinct domains. As Director of European Operations for a Kollmorgen Corporation subsidiary — a NATO-standard defence technology company — he directed cross-border design-in programmes with defence primes including Thales, Leonardo, Dassault Aviation, and DASA, and led the first sectoral BS5750 Part 1 / ISO 9001 certification of its kind in Europe in 1989, when quality management system adoption was still in its formative phase across European industry. As a senior hire at Accenture's UKI practice he was assigned to a Diamond-client engagement where he stabilised a high-value transnational banking relationship through the application of management cybernetics and structural diagnostic methods. A further fifteen years of independent advisory practice spanned health, MedTech, defence, and transnational manufacturing at executive and board level.

His doctoral research — a Doctor of Professional Studies completed at Middlesex University, applying Beer's Viable Systems Model to the design of a viable regulatory interface organisation between structurally incompatible systems — was examined and commended by an external examiner who was a direct associate of Stafford Beer. That research is the theoretical foundation for IHRI Unit 03's VAIAS-ORG™ framework for governance architecture in agentic AI deployment contexts, published as IHRI Working Paper IHRI-U03-WP-2026-001 and available at ihri.edu.eu/complex-systems-space. He also holds an MBA from Oxford Brookes University.

Selected Publications

• Hodgers, N. and Hodgers, A. (2009). Transnational Corporations: The Irish Centre Experience. In J. Garnett, C. Costley and B. Workman (eds.), Work Based Learning: Journeys to the Core of Higher Education. Middlesex University Press, London. ISBN: 9781904750192.
• Hodgers, A. (2026). One Architecture, Three Descriptions: A Unified Mapping of Beer's Viable Systems Model, the EU AI Act Essential Requirements, the Nannini Agentic Compliance Sequence, and VAIAS-ORG Across a Single Coherent Architecture. IHRI Unit 03 Working Paper IHRI-U03-WP-2026-001. Available at: ihri.edu.eu/complex-systems-space

Nicole Foster is an operational, clinical, and academic executive with extensive experience in managing complex, regulated, and remote operations across four continents. She holds a Master of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and is a Fellow of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine (FAWM) — one of the most demanding clinical credentials in extreme environment medicine, requiring demonstrated competency in the management of medical emergencies in environments far from definitive care.

Her clinical background is unusually broad for an operational executive. She is dual-registered as a paramedic and nurse, with a specialism in remote and austere prehospital care. Her operational experience spans military, mining, and NGO sectors, where she has led and managed clinical teams in environments ranging from active conflict zones to remote industrial sites and humanitarian emergencies. She has designed benchmarking and competency frameworks for medical and allied health professionals operating under international standards, and has developed and deployed remote learning programmes for clinical education in environments where conventional face-to-face delivery is not viable.

As Chief Operating Officer of IHRI, she is responsible for the institutional integrity of both operational pillars: the MFHEA-accredited Doctor of Health Science academic programme and the Unit 03 applied research programme. Her clinical governance background gives her direct oversight of the quality assurance infrastructure required for a licensed higher education institution; her remote and austere healthcare experience gives her operational understanding of the extreme environment contexts that Vector A's research addresses. Her Fellowship of the Academy of Wilderness Medicine positions her as a practitioner contributor to the allostatic load and analogue environment dimensions of IHRI-U03-WP-2026-004. She is a member of the Australian College of Paramedicine.