Michael Byram

Mike is Professor Emeritus at Durham University School of Education and Guest Research Professor, Sofia University St Kliment Ohridski.  He studied languages at King’s College Cambridge and wrote a PhD on Danish literature. He then taught in an English comprehensive school. At Durham, he was Director of Higher Degrees and supervised and examined students in the UK and countries in Europe, East Asia and South America. His research has focussed on language education, minority education and the supervision and assessment of doctorate students.

Prue Holmes

Prue is Professor of Intercultural Communication and Education, and Director of Research in the School of Education, Durham University, United Kingdom. Her research areas include critical intercultural pedagogies for intercultural communication and education, language and intercultural communication education, and multilingualism in research and doctoral education. Prue has led and been co-investigator on several international and UKRI-funded projects; she was former chair of the International Association of Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC); she co-edits the Multilingual Matters book series Researching Multilingually.

Dimitra Kokotsaki

Dimitra is an Associate Professor at the School of Education at Durham University. She has expertise in doctoral education, arts and music education, creativity, student well-being, engagement and resilience. She has conducted a number of research projects which have led to numerous publications in international journals. Her research interests include the identification and improvement of the instructional, behavioural and socio-psychological conditions in educational settings with a specific focus on creativity, engagement and attitudes to learning. Dimitra is also interested in exploring the connection between movement and well-being, from a psychosocial and embodied cognition perspective.

Julie Rattray

Julie  is Professor in the School of Education, Durham University. Her research interests include the Threshold Concept Framework, liminality, affective dimensions of learning as well as other aspects of policy and pedagogy in Higher Education. In recent years Julie has been involved in funded research projects and conference organisation in the area of Higher Education.

Maria Stoicheva

Maria is Vice-Dean, Jean Monnet Chair, and Professor in the Department of European Studies, Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Stan Taylor

Stan is an Honorary Professor in the School of Education, Durham University. His research interests lie within the field of comparative doctoral education. He was co-author of ‘A Handbook for Doctoral Supervisors’ and co-editor and contributor to ‘The Making of Doctoral Supervisors’ and ‘Doctoral Examination: Exploration of Practice Across the Globe’. He wrote the sector-approved ‘Framework for Good Supervisory Practice’ on behalf of the UK Council for Graduate Education and currently chairs its Research Supervisors’ Network.

Nina Tsvetkova

Nina is Associate Professor at the University of Sofia. Her scientific interests are mainly in the field of intercultural learning and building intercultural communicative competence, electronic and distance learning, language learning methodology, multilingualism, internationalization and Europeanization of education. In these areas she publishes independently or in co-authorship.

Maria Helena Araújo e Sá

Maria is a Full Professor of Language Education in the Department of Education and Psychology of the University of Aveiro (Portugal), where she works in the areas of intercomprehension, plurilingualism, and interculturality, coordinating research, training and knowledge transfer to society. She is involved in several cooperation programs for advanced training with Portuguese-speaking African countries. She is consultant to the OEI’s “Bilingual and Intercultural Border Schools” Programme. She is the Director of the Doctoral Programme in Education and the Coordinator of the Research Centre on Didactics and Technology in Education of Trainers.

Pierre Batteau

Pierre is emeritus professor at the Institut d’Administration des Entreprises, Aix-Marseille Université. Educated as an ingénieur in physics at INSA Lyon France, and  PhD in economics from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, he has been involved in doctoral education at the French national level for more than forty years, supervising dozens of dissertations, sitting in many doctorate juries in social sciences, and assessing candidates for associate and full professorships in the national contests for academic positions. In the early 2000, he became director of the doctoral school in economics and management of his university. He has been co-founder and president of the European Doctoral Association in Management and Business Administration (EDAMBA), and vice-president of the European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM).

 Lilian Bentancur 

 Lilian is Professor in higher education at the University CLAEH (Uruguay). She has guided master´s candidates towards completion, and supervised dissertations at that university and at the Catholic University of Uruguay, where she has also been Director of the Master in Education. She holds a master´s degree in curriculum and evaluation and a PhD in education from that university. Her fields of expertise focus on academic literacy and on doctoral education, particularly on the role of tutors. She has been Director of the course of Monitoring Research in Higher Education since 2014. 

Eli Bitzer

Eli is Professor Emeritus in higher education studies and a past director of the Centre for Higher and Adult Education at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has guided 92 master’s and doctoral candidates towards completion and contributed over 90 articles to scholarly journals and chapters to academic books. He has also chaired four international conferences on postgraduate supervision and published widely on the topic. Eli facilitates workshops and short courses on postgraduate education and supervision and has a keen interest in promoting the quality of postgraduate research in South Africa, Africa and elsewhere.

Suyoun Byoun

Suyoun is an Associate Professor of General Education, and Director of the International Student Success Center, Busan University of Foreign Studies, South Korea. She holds a master’s degree in European Studies from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium and a PhD in educational administration from Korea University, Korea. Her research interests include college impact, internationalization of higher education, and doctoral education. 

Sónia Cardoso

Sónia Cardoso is an Assistant Professor at Lusófona University and a full researcher at its Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Education and Development (CeiED), Portugal. Her research focuses on higher education (HE) policies and institutional analysis, particularly examining how policies affect HE institutions’ structures, processes, practices, and actors, with a special interest in doctoral education. Actively contributing to national and international research initiatives, she has participated in numerous funded projects, including co-leading two on doctoral education, and maintains a relevant publication record in international peer-reviewed indexed venues. She is a member of CHER, SRHE, including its Postgraduate Issues Network, and participates in VOICES COST network CA20137.

Montserrat Castello

Montserrat is Full Professor in Educational Psychology at Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona, Spain. Director of the Research Institute on Psychology and Educational Sciences at Ramon Llull University from 2002-2008.

She is leading the Interuniversity Seminar on Identity & New Trajectories in Education, awarded and funded by the Catalan Government.

Her research activity and publications focus on academic, research writing and learning, writing regulation, and researcher identity development. Her current projects are on writer and researcher identity development.

Shuhua Chen

Shuhua is an Assistant Professor at the School of Education, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Her research interests include doctoral education, qualitative research, and high school teaching and learning. She was educated in China and Canada; and she publishes, translates, and teaches in Chinese and in English. Her most recent completed project was about doctoral students’ career preparation funded by the Ministry of Education of China.

Alice Chik

Alice is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at Macquarie University, Australia. She is the Director of Research Training and supports doctoral students’ academic and career development. Alice’s academic background is in second language learning and teaching, and her recent research interests include urban multilingualism, digital practices for language learning, and narrative inquiry. She regularly collaborates with community and not-for-profit organisations to empower the community language education sector in Greater Sydney. 

Nilza Costa

Nilza is a retired Full Professor from the University of Aveiro/UA (Portugal) where she taught for around 40 years. She is an integrated member of the Research Centre on Didactics and Technology in the Education of Trainers at UA. Her research has focused on Didactics of Physics/Science, Supervision and evaluation, and Educational Research in Portuguese speaking countries (Angola, Brazil, Cape Vert and S. Tomé& Principe). At UA, she was Coordinator of two PhD Programs and Director of the Integrated Centre of Teacher Education.

Gokce Gokalp

Gokce is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Sciences at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey and has a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Southern California. Her research interests include examining problems graduate students experience and developing services and programs to provide both academic and emotional support for graduate students as well as policies regarding graduate education. She has several book chapters and articles on doctoral education, with the latest one on developments in doctoral education published in Innovations in Education and Teaching International journal titled ¨International Developments in Doctoral Education: The Case of Türkiye¨.

Cally Guerin

Cally is a Researcher Developer at the Australian National University. Her career has spanned university lecturing, professional editing and English language teaching. Since 2008 her focus has been on teaching, researching and publishing on doctoral education. At ANU she delivers workshops for PhD candidates and their supervisors to develop effective research practices. Much of her time is spent unpacking, translating and critiquing research culture for newcomers. She is a founding co-editor of the Doctoral Writing blog.

Karri Holley

Karri is Professor of Higher Education at The University of Alabama (USA). Her research examines the structure and processes of the contemporary university, with an emphasis on graduate and doctoral education. She has also written on interdisciplinary work in higher education as well as narrative structure and the writing process related to qualitative inquiry. She currently works on grant-funded projects focused on interdisciplinary graduate education and education evaluation. She held leadership roles in international associations, including chair of the AERA Graduate and Postdoctoral Education across the Disciplines SIG. Holley served as editor for Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education.

Kazuaki Iwabuchi

Kazuaki is Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Education, the University of Tokyo. His research explores how stakeholders negotiate reform within institutional constraints. With a focus on Japan’s doctoral education, he highlights challenges and efforts toward internationalisation. Dr. Iwabuchi’s work offers insights into fostering inclusive, globally engaged doctoral education and academic communities.

Consolata Kabonesa

Consolata is an Associate Professor and a former Dean of the School of Women and Gender Studies, Makerere University. She studied human and community development and Gender roles in international development from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. Consolata taught gender studies at the school, and she has supervised and examined PhD students from Uganda, Malawi and Sweden. Her research focuses on gender, health, climate change, leadership, doctoral education, and response of policy to gender issues.

Barbara M. Kehm

Barbara has worked as a researcher and teacher in the field of higher education studies for more than 30 years at Kassel University (Germany), University of Glasgow (UK) and University of Hannover (Germany). From 2004 until 2011 she was managing director of the International Centre for Higher Education Research at Kassel University. Her fields of expertise focus on internationalisation of higher education, changes of governance and management in higher education and changes of doctoral education. She has had guest professorships in China, Syria, Canada and Latin America and was an invited speaker and keynote speaker at conferences, seminars and workshops in more than 50 countries around the world. Her publications comprise more than 30 books and more than 300 journal articles and book chapters.

Juliet Lum

Juliet is the Graduate Research Development Manager at Macquarie University’s Graduate Research Academy. With a PhD in English Linguistics, she worked in language technology companies for some years before returning to academia. Juliet has over 15 years’ experience as a PhD educator with research and teaching expertise in academic writing and doctoral education. She is the co-founder and co-facilitator of the bimonthly Doctoral Writing Discussions, which gathers doctoral researcher developers from around the world to discuss research and practice in doctoral writing pedagogies.

Vijay Mallan

Vijay Kumar is an Associate Professor of Higher Education at the University of Otago in New Zealand. He is the first person outside the UK to achieve the designation of Recognised Research Supervisor conferred by the UK Council of Graduate Education. Guided by the research-informed Otago Doctoral Supervision Programme, he has empowered doctoral supervisors in 45 universities across 22 countries, facilitating transformative shifts in their supervisory approaches. He researches doctoral supervision, feedback dynamics and doctoral examinations. His recent works include “Doctoral Examination: Exploring Practice Across the Globe,” (Routledge, 2023)  with Stan Taylor and Sharon Sharmini, and “Global Perspectives on Enhancing Doctoral Co-supervision,” (Springer, 2024) with Navé Wald.

Diana Oliveira

Diana is an invited Assistant Professor at the Department of Education and Psychology of the University of Aveiro, Portugal, and a member of the Research Centre Didactics and Technology in Education of Trainers (CIDTFF). She has a PhD in Education, with a specialisation in Supervision and Evaluation. She has research interests in supervision, evaluation and assessment (of learning, organisations and performance).

Susana Pinto

Susana is a researcher at the Research Centre Didactics and Technology in the Education of Trainers based in the Department of Education and Psychology at the University of Aveiro, where she teaches and supervises master’s and doctoral student. Her research interests include language education policies, language policies in scientific research, intercultural doctoral supervision and research across languages and cultures. She is the coordinator of the Laboratory of Education in Languages (LabELing).

Alex Standen

Alex is Head of Academic Development at the London School of Economics, where she has oversight of a wide and varied portfolio of events, workshops, programmes, resources and funding opportunities for all LSE staff who teach and support learning, including research supervisors. Her first role in academic development was leading UCL’s programme for Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) and she has maintained an interested in GTAs since then, co-leading a national network for staff supporting GTAs and editing the journal Postgraduate Pedagogies. She is co-editor of Shaping Higher Education with Students: Ways to Connect Research and Teaching (Tong, Standen and Sotiriou, UCL Press 2018), in which GTAs, students and academics explored how they can work in partnership to advance research-based education. Alex re-developed and led UCL’s supervisor development programme and has contributed chapters on Italy to The Making of Doctoral Supervisors (Taylor, Kiley and Holley, Routledge 2020) and Doctoral Examination: Exploring Practice Across the Globe (Kumar, Taylor and Sharmini, Routledge 2023).

Fumiko Takahashi

Fumiko is Associate Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Japan. She studies international comparison of immigrant education and social integration with a particularly focus on the role of teachers and career education for migrant students. She has conducted several action research projects working with schools and NPOs. She is also interested in diversity and inclusion in higher education in the globalised era.

Nompilo Tshuma

Nompilo is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Higher and Adult Education at Stellenbosch University. She is passionate about developing new researchers (postgraduate students and early career academics) and supporting them as they develop strong disciplinary identities. Her research and postgraduate supervision focus on a critical and contextualised exploration of educational technology integration in higher education. Currently, she is exploring the intersection between new technologies (e.g. GenAI) and doctoral education.

Manuela Wagner

Manuela is Professor of Language Education at the University of Connecticut and specialises in integrating intercultural dialogue and social justice education into language education. Passionate about merging theory with practice, she collaborates across educational levels. Other research interests include intellectual humility and conviction, human rights education, humour in a variety of contexts (language education, German-speaking cultures), and first language acquisition (pragmatic development in infants and children and language development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder).

Navé Wald

Navé is a Senior Lecturer at the Higher Education Development Centre (HEDC) of the University of Otago in Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand. His role includes working as an academic developer with both academic staff and students at all levels, as well as being a researcher and teacher in higher education studies. His research interests include doctoral co-supervision, assessment in higher education, and critical thinking in academic research. He is co-editor and contributor to Global Perspectives on Enhancing Doctoral Co-supervision. His teaching interests include supporting those new to research in higher education and helping students at all levels to develop their critical skills.