Tristan McCowan is Professor of International Education at the Institute of Education, University College London. His work focuses on higher education and international development, particularly in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, including issues of access, quality, innovation and impact. His latest book is Higher Education for and beyond the Sustainable Development Goals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and he is editor of Compare – a Journal of International and Comparative Education. He is the principal investigator for the Transforming Universities for a Changing Climate research project.

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Research Gate 

Caine Rolleston is Professor in Education and International Development at UCL Institute of Education. He has worked on education and international development in a range of countries including Ghana, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Peru, India and Sri Lanka, and is currently Senior Education Associate for the Young Lives comparative international study of childhood poverty, based at the University of Oxford. For Young Lives, he leads the development of school surveys and research on school effectiveness. His research interests include issues in the economics of education in developing countries, educational access and equity, privatisation, learning metrics and trajectories, longitudinal studies in education and development, cognitive and non-cognitive skills development and survey design.

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IRIS Profile 

Dr Alexandre Apsan Frediani is a Principal Researcher at the Human Settlements Group of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Alexandre specialises on issues around human development in cities of the global South. Alexandre’s work explores participatory approaches to planning and design of interventions in informal settlements in cities in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. He has also been conducting research and development projects focusing on the role of knowledge production and translation in advancing a more socially and environmentally just urban development. In his most recent research initiatives, Alexandre is a co-investigator for the research projects Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality and Transforming Universities for a Changing Climate. Alexandre is an expert affiliate of Architecture Sans Frontières-UK, and he is part of the boards of Habitat International Coalition and the Sierra Leone Urban Research Centre.

Brad Blitz is Professor of International Politics and Policy at the UCL Institute of Education and until June 2019 was Director of the British Academy/DFID Programme on Modern Slavery. His research focuses on displacement, governance and human rights. He is the author of Migration and Freedom: Mobility, Citizenship and Exclusion and recently acted as Principal Investigator for the ESRC-DFID project EVI-MED on refugee reception systems in the Mediterranean and EU project INFORM on access to legal and procedural information for asylum-seekers. He is also Co-Investigator on a £15 million ‘hub’ on Gender, Justice and Security, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF); and Co-Investigator of a new GCRF Cluster project, Life After Deportation, a study of refused and current asylum-seekers returned to Mexico and Guatemala from the USA.

Dr Kaori Kitagawa is Associate Professor at UCL Institute of Education. Her research interests have been learning outside of formal education systems, with an application of comparative perspectives. Her current focus is disaster preparedness, particularly concerning community engagement and participatory approaches. Considering preparedness activities as co-learning applying pedagogical perspectives, she has published widely in disaster research journals as well as educational journals. The research findings are also discussed in her module ‘Reimagining disaster education: perspectives and methodologies’, which has been launched this year. 

Dr Charlotte Nussey is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Education, University College London. Her research focuses on education and intersecting inequalities, particularly around gender, climate and violence, and through qualitative research. She has worked as a consultant on a range of education and international development projects, including participatory research into sustainable development in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya and Zambia.  Her most recent publication focuses on the relationship between structural inequalities and discourses around educational exclusion, published in the journal Oxford Development Studies.

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ResearchGate

Dr Lorena Sánchez Tyson is a Research Fellow at UCL's Institute of Education. She completed her PhD in Education and International Development at the Institute of Education, University College London, and is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA). Her doctoral research explored the role and meaning of literacy in the context of an Indigenous language education programme for adults in Mexico. She has previously worked in the area of Policy and Strategy at the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) and in programme management for two NGOs in the United States. Recent publications include an edited special issue for the London Review of Education as well as articles in the journals Changing English, The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning and Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.

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Dr Palesa Molebatsi is a Research Fellow at University College London's Institute of Education. She completed her PhD on the nexus between higher education and development at the Centre for Researching Education and Labour (REAL), University of the Witwatersrand. She has conducted research on the public good role of universities in South Africa; the role of vocational training in reducing inequality and promoting sustainability in Africa; skills needs for the greening of critical industrial sectors such as the automotive and chemicals sectors; and theories of change in impact evaluations of government and donor interventions in education and training. Her most recent publication, forthcoming in the Journal of Higher Education in Africa (JHEA), looks at higher education indicators and the public good in Africa.

Joy Perry is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment at UCL Institute of Education. Her research centres on how subjective well-being is achieved for students in secondary school, specifically regarding social relationships, agency and engagement. Joy holds an MA in Effective Learning and Teaching with distinction from UCL Institute of Education and has previously worked as a secondary school teacher of History and Geography in the USA.

Ketan Dandare is a doctoral candidate at Institute of Education, University College London. His research explores the use of models in school physics lessons through theoretical perspectives originated in the domain of philosophy of science. He is also a member of a global alliance of researchers and activists working on social justice issues in India where he contributes to the development of an educational programme by looking at the Indian context through an intersectional lens. He has published in a variety of venues including the journal Physics Education, the Occasional Paper series of Observer Research Foundation (an independent think tank in India), and the blog of UKFIET. He is also a co-author of a chapter in a forthcoming book on the theme of education in troubled times to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 

Research Gate

Kate is an MA Education and International Development student at UCL's Institute of Education, University College London.  She has worked in Tanzania, Indonesia, China and the UK as a teacher and teacher trainer, and her MA research has focused on sustainable funding and early literacy and language in East African education systems, and teacher training in West Africa. She is currently working at UNESCO UIL as part of the policy support and capacity development team.  

Lucy Page is a MA Education, Health Promotion and International Development student at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. She is currently undertaking research on the relationship between education, wellbeing and climate vulnerability in Ladakh, India. Prior to her MA, Lucy graduated from the University of Warwick with a BASc in Politics, International Studies and Global Sustainable Development.

Rachel Gee is a Research Assistant at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. She is currently working towards an MA in Education, Gender and International Development. Alongside her studies she works as a freelance writer and content director. Recent work includes articles focusing on technology and sustainability, along with a content project for Business Alliance Against Malaria. 

Sophie Ho is a BA Education Studies student at UCL's Institute of Education, University College London. Her research interests lie in early childhood and primary education, child development and English language learning, as well as comparative education and international development.

Jiayi Zhang is a BA Education Studies student at UCL's Institute of Education, University College London. Her research interests focus on educational equality and social justice, and also identity formation and presentation.