Head of the Observatory of Higher Education Innovations at Jacobs University, Bremen

(Germany)

J. Douglas Willms
President, The Learning Bar

Research Interest

Dr. J. Douglas Willms is a member of the US National Academy of Education, Past-President of the International Academy of Education Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. From 1995 to 2018, Dr. Willms was Professor of Education at the University of New Brunswick, where for eight years he held the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Chair in Human Development and for fourteen years held the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Literacy and Human Development. He is the President of The Learning Bar, an international company that provides research-based tools and training for enhancing the life chances of children and youth.

Dr. Willms has published over two hundred research articles and monographs pertaining to youth literacy, children’s health, the accountability of schooling systems, and the assessment of national reforms. He played lead roles in developing Canada’s National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) and the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). He and his colleagues designed the Early Years Evaluation (EYE), an instrument for the direct assessment of children’s developmental skills at ages 3 to 6, and OurSchool, an evaluation system for the continuous monitoring of student engagement and well-being. Dr. Willms is the lead researcher in designing the contextual questionnaires for PISA for Development, an initiative for low- and middle-income countries aimed at tracking international educational targets in the post-2015 UN framework. His research team is also working with school leaders in 30 First Nations schools in the design and implementation of Confident Learners, a whole-school and whole-community literacy program based on the science of literacy and instructional practice.

Jacqueline P. Leighton

Bio and Research Interests

JACQUELINE P. LEIGHTON was born in Santiago, Chile and immigrated to Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) in 1975 and then to Canada (Calgary) in 1978. Leaving her homeland of Chile in 1975, two years after the coup d'etat and the start of the Pinochet dictatorship, which brought on significant human rights violations against those who spoke out against the dictatorship, instilled in her a lifelong commitment to independent, critical thinking, fundamental human rights, and specifically freedom of expression. This commitment is observed in her ongoing research interests in human development, cognition and its translation into fair educational methods and practices, inclusive of cognitive diagnostic assessment and think aloud interviews.

Professor Jari Lavonen

Professor in Physics and Chemistry Education at the University of Helsinki

Bio and Research Interests

Jari Lavonen has been researching science and technology education and teacher education for the last thirty years. His main research interests include science and technology teaching, learning and assessment; interest, motivation and engagement in learning; curriculum development; teacher education; and the use of education technology in education. He has published more than 600 publications, together with colleagues, 130 of them are refereed papers in journals, 130 refereed papers in international books. 

Jonathan D. Jansen

Bio and Research Interest

Jonathan D. Jansen is a distinguished professor of education at Stellenbosch University and president of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He was born in Montagu and grew up in Steenberg and Retreat. He completed his BSc at the University of the Western Cape and his teaching credentials at Unisa before doing an MS at Cornell University and a PhD at Stanford University. He was a high school biology teacher in Vredenburg and District Six and spent the rest of his career in university teaching and leadership around South Africa. In addition to his work in changing schools, he leads a major project on behalf of the Minister of Higher Education that prepares promising young academics from the 26 public universities for the professoriate. His research is broadly concerned with the politics of knowledge, as laid out in his award-winning book, Knowledge in the blood.

Prof. Dr. Drs. Jürgen Baumert
Director and Professor for Education

Research Interest

Large-scale assessment (TIMSS and PISA), learning and instruction in mathematics, teacher expertise, longitudinal studies on development in childhood and adolescence, and institutions as differential learning environments.

Professor and Director of Cross-cultural Assessment and Research Methods in Education (CARME)

AREAS OF RESEARCH INTEREST
Educational measurement and research methods in education
Cross-cultural and language issues in measurement
Validity of assessment and research generalizations

SELECTED POSITIONS
Member, International Test Commission Council (2012 - )
Member, Board of Directors of the National Council on Measurement in Education (2008-2011)
Member of the US National Academy of Sciences Committee on Foundations of Assessment (1998-2001)
Associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (2000 – present)

Kristiina Kumpulainen

Bio and Research Interests

Dr. Kristiina Kumpulainen is a Professor and Head of the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada. She earned her PhD in Education from the University of Exeter in the UK. Prior to her current role, she served as a Professor and Associate Dean of Academic and Faculty Development at Simon Fraser University, and as a Professor and Associate Dean of Research at the University of Helsinki in Finland. She has led numerous research projects, centers, and networks, including the Playful Learning Center, the Nordic research network on Digitalizing Childhoods (DigiChild), and the CICERO Learning Network at the University of Helsinki.

Professor Kumpulainen’s internationally recognized research examines how sociopolitical and digital contexts shape social interaction and learning. She is particularly known for her contributions to understanding how children and youth engage in learning across diverse formal and informal settings, such as schools, museums, and digital environments, and how these experiences are influenced by culture, technology, and power. Her scholarly work has advanced interdisciplinary knowledge in areas such as STEAM education, multiliteracies, health literacies, children’s ecological literacies, and climate change education. She has made significant methodological contributions to educational research through the development and use of multimodal, visual and participatory approaches in studies conducted with and for children and educators.

Her research has received several competitive grants from the Academy of Finland, the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, Kone Foundation, the Cultural Foundation of Finland, The Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS), EU Horizon, the Australian Research Council, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Dr. Kumpulainen has been recognized as one of the world's top 2% most-cited scientists, according to Stanford University's 2024 database.

She currently serves as Co-Editor of Learning, Culture and Social Interaction (Elsevier) and sits on the boards of several international organizations and panels focused on education, technology, and the learning sciences.

Lauren Resnick
Distinguished University Professor and Co-Director, Institute for Learning,
University of Pittsburgh

Bio and Research Interest

Professor Lauren Resnick has served on the faculty of the University of Pittsburg since 1966, rising through the ranks from Assistant Professor to Distinguished University Professor. Along the way she has published extensively and garnered an impressive set of awards and honors. She served as President of the American Educational Research Association in 1986-87. The received the E. L. Thorndike Award from the American Psychological Association in 1998 and the Walker Foundation Distinguished Lecture Award in 2009. In 2013 she was elected to membership in the National Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research interests include learning and development, scientific understanding in children, and socially shared cognition.

Leticia J. Marteleto

Bio and Research Interest

Leticia J. Marteleto is an associate professor of sociology and faculty research associate at the University of Texas at Austin Population Research Center. She is also a research affiliate at UT Austin’s Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and is currently serving as associate chair of the Department of Sociology. She serves as the principal investigator of Decode Zika (https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/zika/people/the-team.php). 

Her primary areas of work include social demography, education and health inequality, race stratification, international comparative, Africa and Latin America. Her recent research has appeared in Demography, Demographic Research, Population and Development Review, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Social Forces and Studies in Family Planning.