Dean’s Distinguished Research Fellows
Dean’s Distinguished Research Fellows
The Dean’s Distinguished Research Fellows will work with the Faculty of Education to offer leadership and expertise in specific areas of our research.
Dean’s Distinguished Research Fellows 2023-2026
Tracey Bunda
Professor Indigenous Education, Office of the PVC-Indigenous, University of Queensland
Tracey is a Ngugi/Wakka Wakka woman and holds senior Indigenous leadership positions in academia. Her research explores race, power, storying methodology, and Indigenous women's agency in community uplift. With recent publications on Indigenising doctoral spaces and school diversity, she actively mentors emerging Indigenous scholars, upholding ancestral excellence, and serves on the Hymba Yumba Independent School board.
Emma Smith
Professor of Education, University of Warwick
Emma is a dedicated social justice and educational equity researcher who focuses on policy impact on inequality reduction in education. With extensive publications and funding from the ESRC, Nuffield Foundation, and EU, she specializes in large-scale dataset analysis for educational research and co-edits the BERA SAGE Handbook of Educational Research.
Adam Lefstein
Professor of Education, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Adam specializes in pedagogy, classroom interaction, teacher learning, and educational change. Passionate about meaningful research-practice connections, he founded the Center for the Study of Pedagogy at Ben-Gurion University. His recent work includes studies on Israeli culture, primary pedagogy, video-based debriefs, and language and classroom participation.
Adam's research profile | Twitter: @ALefstein
Dean’s Distinguished Research Fellows 2023-2026
Rita Irwin
Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Art Education and Curriculum Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada
Rita is an artist, researcher and teacher, deeply committed to the arts, curriculum studies and education whose work has been funded by multiple SSHRC grants, achieving impact across Australia, China, Japan, Kenya and Spain. Rita is a recipient of the Ted A. Aoki Award for Distinguished Service in Canadian Curriculum Studies.
Rita's research profile | Twitter: @irwinrita
Mario Novelli
Professor in the Political Economy of Education, University of Sussex, UK
Mario is Principal Investigator of the UKRI Global Challenge Research Fund Network Plus Grant project – The Political Economy of Education in Conflict Contexts and a former director of the Centre for International Education at the University of Sussex in England.
Mario's researh profile | Twitter: @novelli_mario
Ben Rampton
Professor of Applied and Sociolinguistics, King’s College London, UK
Ben is closely involved in the Hub for Education and Linguistic Diversity (HELD). He is a key figure in the field of linguistic ethnography; he edits Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies; and his books include Language in Late Modernity: Interaction in an Urban School (2006) and Linguistic Practice in Changing Conditions (2022).
Annalisa Sannino
Professor of Education, Tampere University, Finland
Annalisa is a world-renowned scholar in cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), one of the originators of the Change Laboratory approach to participatory intervention research, and the key theoriser of transformative agency in the CHAT tradition.
Annalisa's research profile | Twitter: @SanninoAnnalisa
Janelle T. Scott
Robert C. and Mary Catherine Birgeneau Distinguished Chair in Educational Disparities, University of California at Berkeley, USA
Janelle is an elected member of the US National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and a critical education policy researcher. Her book The Politics of Education in an Era of Inequality won the 2020 Critic’s Choice Award of the American Educational Studies Association.
Janelle's research profile | Twitter: @janelletscott