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. 

Lorin W. Anderson
Carolina Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina (USA)

Bio and Research Interest

Professor Anderson spent his entire academic career at the University of South Carolina, arriving in August, 1973, and retiring in August, 2006.  During his career at the University he taught graduate courses in research design, curriculum development, assessment, and evaluation.  Since his retirement, he has spent his time consulting with educators and policy makers on the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy, curriculum development, and effective teaching strategies for children of poverty in the United States, Eastern Europe, and South America.   His primary research interests are the nurturing of young educational researchers, the allocation and productive use of school time, and improving the quality of education for economically-disadvantaged children and youth.  In 2003, he co-founded the Center of Excellence to Prepare Teachers of Children of Poverty, which is located at Francis Marion University.  He has established an endowed fund at the University of South Carolina to support first-generation college students who aspire to become educators.

Lucia Mason
Professor of Developmental and Educational Psychology, University of Padua, Italy. 

Bio and Research Interests

Lucia Mason has been the chair of the master program in Developmental and Educational Psychology at the University of Padua where she previously was the coordinator of a doctoral program in developmental and socialization processes. She was Fulbright scholar at the University of Georgia (US) and the recipient of the EARLI publication award. Past editor-in-chief of Learning and Instruction, she currently is a member of the editorial board of several high-ranking journals. She has carried out studies on conceptual change; learning from text; epistemic beliefs; evaluation and comprehension of online information on controversial issues; digital reading, text comprehension and metacomprehension. Her methodological interests focus on process-data, in particular eye-tracking data and physiological indices, to study cognitive processing in school tasks, as well as the connections between cognition and affect in learning. Her current research interest also regards the role of the school physical environment ‒ indoor classroom and outdoor green areas ‒ on cognitive functioning, academic performance and affect. She has widely published internationally and nationally. 

Ludger Woessmann

Professor of Economics, University of Munich
Director, Ifo Center for the Economics of Education

Bio and Research Interest

Ludger Woessmann is Professor of Economics at the University of Munich and Director of the Ifo Center for the Economics of Education at the Ifo Institute. His main research interests are the determinants of long-run prosperity and of student achievement. He uses microeconometric methods to answer applied, policy-relevant questions of the empirical economics of education, often using international student achievement tests. Special focusses address the importance of education for economic prosperity – individual and societal, historical and modern – and the importance of institutions of the school systems for efficiency and equity. Further research topics cover aspects of economic history, economics of religion, and the Internet. His work was rewarded, among others, with the Gossen Prize of the German Economic Association, the Young Economist Award of the European Economic Association, the EIB Prize of the European Investment Bank, and the Bruce H. Choppin Memorial Award of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement.

Professor M. Beatrice Ligorio

Full Professor, University of Bari (Italy)

Professor M. Beatrice Ligoria teaches Educational Psychology and a specialized course on E-learning. She a co-founder of the Collaborative Knowledge Building Group (www.ckbg.org) and is the main editor of the journal Qwerty.   She is currently member of the Executive Committee of the Italian Association of Psychology (AIP) for the section of Developmental and Educational Psychology. She has been a member of EARLI and the ISCAR Executive Committee. She has been nominated by the Minister of Education, Instruction and University as a member for the National Scientific Qualification.  Her research interests lie in the areas of educational technology, innovation in education, communities, identity, learning organization, intersubjectivity, blended and mobile learning, dialogical approach, virtual environments, sustainable learning, knowledge building, social networks and web-forum in education. 

Marc Depaepe
Professor of History of Education and History of Psychology
University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Campus Kulak, Kortrijk

Research Interest

Researcher at the University of Leuven (1977), Lecturer (1984), Assistant Professor (1990), Professor (1993) and Extra-ordinary and Ordinary Professor 1996/2000). Served previously as Head of the department of Educational Sciences at Leuven (2001-2004), Head of the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences at Kortrijk (2004-2009), and Coordinator of the Human Sciences at Kortrijk (2007-2009). Lectures at the campus Kortrijk: history of education and history of behavioral sciences, and at the main campus in Leuven: history of modern educational systems. His main research interests are: 1. History of educational and behavioral sciences, especially pedology, experimental pedagogy, and educational psychology; 2. History of education at large in Belgium (especially primary education); 3. International historiography of education (including theoretical, methodological and conceptual issues); 4. History of colonial and postcolonial education (especially Congo).

Professor Marcia C. Linn

Evelyn Lois Corey Professor of Instructional Science at the Berkeley School of Education

University of California, Berkeley

Bio and Research Interests

Marcia C. Linn is the Evelyn Lois Corey Professor of Instructional Science at the Berkeley School of Education, University of California, Berkeley.

María de Ibarrola

Professor and Researcher, Cinvestav 3E,
Department of Educational Research, Center for Research and Advanced Studies, Mexico

Bio and Research Interest

Born in Mexico City, she studied Sociology in the Faculty of Political Sciences of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Obtained a Master’s Degree in Sociology in the University of Montreal, P.Q. Canada, and a Doctor’s in Science degree (Educational Research) at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Mexico. 

She has been a National Researcher since 1984, in the highest Rank since 1993.

Her career in Educational Research allowed her to work as an educational researcher ( and learn to do so by experience )  in  three of the main educational Research centers in Mexico: Centro de Estudios Educativos A.C. (México), the first modern educational Research center in the country,  and in the Commission for New Teaching Methods of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she started and developed a line of research on curriculum design. She was also the founder of the Sociology of Education course at the Faculty of Social and Political Studies of the said University.