Our People

Carolina Guzmán-Valenzuela is a full time professor at the Universidad de Tarapacá in Chile. Her research over the last 12 years has focused on the public-private divide, the decolonisation of universities, the production of social science knowledge, and internationalisation, with a particular focus on Chile and Latin America.

Dorothy Ferary is Vice Rector for Research, Community Engagement, and Collaboration at Satya Terra Bhinneka University, Indonesia. Her background is in development studies and her research interests are gender and development, decolonising and inclusive higher education (including integrating local wisdom in research, teaching, and community engagement), and language.

Professor Melanie Walker is a graduate of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the University of Cape Town, where she completed her PhD after teaching at disadvantaged secondary schools for a number of years. She joined the University of the Free State in February 2012 as Senior Research Professor in Higher Education and Human Development. In 2013 she was appointed as NRF Chair in Higher Education and Human Development. She is an Al-rated NRF researcher.

Jamie leads Universities UK International (UUKi) which exists to enable UK universities to flourish internationally through their unique ability to represent them and act in their collective interests.

Dr. Hilligje van’t Land serves the global higher education community as Secretary General of the International Association of Universities (IAU) – global NGO with UNESCO Associate Status. IAU celebrated it’s 70th Anniversary from 9 December 2020 to 9 December 2021. For the past two decades, she has fostered the key role of higher education in societal transformation. She supervises the overall programme activities of the IAU, develops the Association’s strategic plans and oversees the everyday work of the secretariat. She positioned the IAU as partner in UNESCO work on Education for sustainable development and in the UNESCO Futures of Education initiative, and higher education as a key stakeholder for the UN Agenda 2030 – Transforming our world. Hilligje van’t Land strongly believes in the importance of international cooperation and intercultural understanding and has developed multilateral projects related higher education and beyond.

Rebecca Schendel is Managing Director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College (USA). Her scholarship focuses on the impact of higher education on human development in resource-poor contexts, with an emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa.

Darcie Jones is the current Vice President Education at the University of Plymouth Students Union. As the first in her family to attend university, she uses her platform to campaign on issues affecting students from underrepresented backgrounds, with a large focus on lobbying on behalf of commuter students to highlight the disadvantages the student group face, particularly in light of the cost-of-living crisis. She also commits herself to speaking out on the experiences of working-class student leaders in Higher Education and highlighting the need for better support for WC student leaders in enabling them to use sector resources to enact effective change.

Stephen L. DesJardins is a Co-Investigator on CGHE Project 5, ‘Student loan debt and graduate decision-making’.

Dung Doan is a Research Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) and was a CGHE Research Associate on the former Project 2.5, ‘Issues in the economics of higher education financing’.

Chris Millward is Professor of Practice in Education Policy at the University of Birmingham where he leads a group of researchers working on educational equity in policy and practice. He is a Deputy Director of CGHE .

James Robson is Co-Director of Oxford University’s Centre for Skills, Knowledge, and Organisational Performance (SKOPE), Associate Professor of Tertiary Education Systems, and leads Oxford’s MSc in HE. He was a CGHE co-investigator on Project 3, ‘Research on Research: the research function and mission of higher education’.

Natia Sopromadze is a Postdoctoral Research Officer on CGHE Project 9, ‘Mapping supranational higher education space’.