Joe O’Hara
President (July 2026 – June 2028)
Inaugural Professor of Education, Dublin City University (DCU-I0E)
Joe O’Hara is the Inaugural Professor of Education at the Dublin City University (DCU-I0E). He was Head of the School of Education Studies, DCU from 2011-2016 and is Director of EQI- The Centre for Evaluation, Quality and Inspection. He is also Adjunct Faculty at the Centre for Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Having qualified as a secondary school teacher, he worked as Director of the Wadzanai Education Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe (1990-1994), before returning to Ireland where he was employed as a teacher prior to joining DCU. Joe O’Hara has worked in a variety of contexts as a teacher, researcher, evaluator, and administrator and he brings these experiences to his professional engagement with education. He is specifically interested in the areas of educational evaluation, networking, and culturally responsive evaluation. These interests have developed throughout an active career which contributed to a Ph.D. in Educational Evaluation (2007).
His experience as a researcher has allowed him to successfully bid for research grants from a large number of EU funding programmes with total institutional funding over the past 5 years of €1,475,786 and project value above €6,000,000. He is a committed researcher and has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters in addition to numerous policy papers. As a research mentor he is an active supervisor at Doctoral level and has graduated 31 students over the course of his career.
At national level he was awarded with the President’s Research Fellowship and the Government of Ireland IRCHSS Research Fellowship. He also worked with several international bodies including the UNDP, OECD, TAIEX, and Irish Aid. Joe O’Hara has played key leadership roles in education. Between 2002 and 2004 he was appointed by the Government of Ireland as a Director of APSO/Irish Aid and served as a member of the Teaching Council of Ireland from 2012-2016. Joe O’Hara has significant experience in representing institutions and associations at national and international level, namely as Past President of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland and Founding Director of the Irish Evaluation Network (IEN).
He represented Ireland on the Council of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) from 2008 to 2013 and served as its President from 2018-2023. During this period, he helped EERA navigate the COVID-19 crisis ensuring that the Association emerged from this period financially and organizationally intact. He was committed to ensuring that all of EERAs 42 National Associations and 33 Networks had a voice in the strategic direction of the organisation, creating in partnership a 5-year strategy and implementing it during the COVID-19 crisis. He prioritised the development of Early Career Researchers and remains a Senior Fellow of the Emerging Researchers Group. Joe O’Hara was a member of the Executive Committee and Council of the Initiative for Science in Europe and represented EERA on the Council of the European Alliance for Social Sciences and Humanities. Joe O’Hara was a member of WERA Council from 2018 to 2023.
Prof. Yuto Kitamura
Vice President (July 2026 – June 2028)
Yuto Kitamura is Professor at the Graduate School of Education and the Special Advisor to the President for International Strategic Planning at the University of Tokyo in Japan.
He is a member of the Executive Boards of the Japan Educational Research Association (JERA), the Japan Society of Comparative Education, and the Japan Society for International Development Studies.
He is also a member of the Board of Education at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, an Associate Member of the Science Council of Japan, a member and the Chair of Education Committee at the Japanese National Commission for UNESCO, the Visiting Fellow at the JICA Research Institute for Peace and Development, and the Special Advisor to the Rector of Royal University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia.
He specializes in comparative education and has been conducting extensive research on education policies of developing countries, particularly in Southeast Asia. He also conducts his research on the internationalization of higher education as well as Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). His recent publications include Education in Japan: A Comprehensive Analysis of Education Reforms and Practices (co-editor, Springer, 2019), Memory in the Mekong: Regional Identity, Schools, and Politics in Southeast Asia (co-editor, Teachers College Press, 2022), and Towards Ensuring Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education for All: Analyzing School Enrolment Patterns (co-editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
He worked in the Education Sector of UNESCO Headquarters and taught at Nagoya University and Sophia University in Japan. He had served as the Fulbright Scholar at the George Washington University and the Visiting Professor at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh.
He is a recipient of the 14th JSPS Prize, one of the highest honors for young scholars in Japan. He also received an Honorary Doctorate in Social Sciences from Stockholm University. He received his B.A. in education from Keio University in Japan and his M.A. and Ph.D. both in education from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Prof. Rocío García-Carrión
Secretary General (July 2022 – June 2030)
Ikerbasque and Ramon y Cajal Fellow (appointed Associate Professor)
Faculty of Education and Sports
University of Deusto, Spain
Prof. Rocío García-Carrión is an Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of Deusto (Bilbao, Spain). She has been a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where she was also a member of Wolfson College and a visiting researcher at Harvard University. Her research focuses on school and community-based research to investigate dialogic learning environments as pathways to inclusion for systematically excluded populations. She has directed and participated in numerous national and international research projects (FP6, FP7, H2020, Horizon Europe).
She currently leads the Horizon Europe SCIREARLY project (https://scirearly.eu/), involving 10 European countries, dedicated to the study of evidence-based policies and practices to improve academic performance and wellbeing, and reduce early school leaving. She is a member of the Horizon Europe IMPROVA project, which promotes mental health among adolescents in educational settings (https://www.improva-project.eu/). She has served as member of the scientific committee of the EERA as Link Convenor (2016-2019). She has published prolifically (including more than 70 peer-review articles in impact journals, chapters, co-authored books, and more than 100 conference papers). She is associate editor for AERA Open journal, and Deputy Editor for Journal for the Study of Education and Development, and member of several editorial boards. She serves as reviewer for several journal and research agencies.
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5520-5105
Geovana Mendonça Lunardi Mendes
President-Elect (July 2026 – June 2028)
Full Professor of Education at the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina (UDESC), Brazil, where she teaches in the Graduate Program in Education and coordinates the internationalization of graduate education at the Office of Research and Graduate Studies (PROPPG).
She is the President-Elect of the World Education Research Association (WERA), following her service as WERA Vice-President (2024–2026). She also serves as Vice-President of the Latin American Association for Educational Research (ALIE) and is a member of Brazil’s National Education Forum, representing the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), as well as the CAPES Technical-Scientific Council for Basic Education (CTC-EB). She is a CNPq Research Productivity Fellow.
Professor Lunardi Mendes previously served as President of the Brazilian National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Education (ANPEd) from 2019 to 2023 and has held several academic leadership positions in Brazil and internationally.
She earned her Ph.D. in Education from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), including doctoral studies at the University of Minho (Portugal), and completed postdoctoral fellowships in Argentina and the United States, most recently at Arizona State University.
Her research focuses on education policy, curriculum, inclusive education, internationalization of higher education, comparative education, and global research collaboration. She has coordinated numerous national and international research projects and has collaborated extensively with universities, research networks, and multilateral organizations across Latin America, North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Her work is dedicated to advancing high-quality educational research, fostering international partnerships, and strengthening the global education research community.
Prof. Liesel Ebersöhn
Immediate Past President (July 2026 – June 2028)
Director, Centre for the Study of Resilience, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Prof. Liesel Ebersöhn is Full Professor at the University of Pretoria, Director of the Centre for the Study of Resilience and a registered educational psychologist. As an expert on the social dimensions of resilience, she studies collective distress in high-adversity conditions, utilizing Southern Africa as an exemplar. Notably, she developed the Relationship-Resourced Resilience theory, introducing “flocking” as a collective efficacy and agency response that promotes well-being above traditional fight-or-flight mechanisms. Translating this evidence-based research into global social change, she has advised on education policy in Brazil and collaborated with Germany’s Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth. Furthermore, the “flocking” theory actively informs the training of psychosocial support workers in partnership with the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers, as well as the Africa Psychosocial Support Initiative across 13 African countries. A prolific scholar, she has published over 130 peer-reviewed works and supervised more than 35 doctoral students to completion.
ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2616-4973
Appointed Advisors to the Executive Committee
Dr. Felice J. Levine
Appointed Liaison (July 2024 – June 2026)
Executive Director Emerita, American Educational Research Association, US
Felice J. Levine is Executive Director Emerita of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), based in Washington, D.C. From 1991 until 2002, Levine was Executive Officer of the American Sociological Association. She also served as Director of the Law and Social Science Program at the National Science Foundation from 1979 to 1991 and as Senior Research Social Scientist at the American Bar Foundation from 1974 to 1983. Her work has focused on research and science policy issues, research ethics, the academic and scientific workforce, and higher education. She has served as facilitator of WERA-in-formation since 2007. With interdisciplinary background across the social and behavioral sciences, she serves on the Executive Committee of the Consortium of Social Science Associations and is Vice-Chair and on the Board of Directors of the Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics. Levine recently served as chair of the National Research Council Workshop on Protecting Student’s Records and Facilitating Education Research. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Educational Research Association, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. She is a past President of the Law and Society Association. She received her A.B., A.M., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago in sociology and psychology.
Prof. Ingrid Gogolin
Appointed Liaison (July 2024 – June 2026)
Director, Diversity in Education Research
Professor of International Comparative and Intercultural Education
University of Hamburg, Germany
Ingrid is professor of international comparative and intercultural education research at the University of Hamburg and director of the research group ‘Diversity in Education Research’, Faculty of Education at Hamburg University. Her research is focused on problems of migration and linguistic diversity in education. She was coordinator of the European Educational Research Quality Indicators (EERQI) project, a three-year effort to develop new indicators and methodologies on quality of education research publications. She served as the interim president of the World Education Research Association WERA from 2009-2010, and is a past president of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) and the German Education Research Association (GERA/ DGfE). Dr. Gogolin was awarded an honorary doctor’s degree by the University of Dortmund in 2013.
Prof. Dr. Mustafa Yunus Eryaman
Appointed Liaison (July 2024 – June 2026)
President, International Association of Educators
Professor of Educational Policy and Curriculum Studies
Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkiye
Professor Mustafa Yunus Eryaman is a leading figure in education policy and curriculum studies, with a distinguished career spanning diverse academic institutions and leadership roles. He currently serves as Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey, and has held prestigious appointments such as President of the World Education Research Association and Research Expert at the European Commission.
Dr. Eryaman’s academic journey reflects his commitment to international collaboration and intellectual exchange. He was a DAAD-TUBITAK Professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and a Visiting Professor and Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Education at London Metropolitan University, UK. His research interests encompass educational policy, philosophy of education, curriculum theory and research, qualitative inquiry, and progressive education, as evidenced by his publications like “Teaching as Practical Philosophy” and his editorship of renowned book series like “Evidence, Science and Public Good in Education” with Springer and “Global perspectives on Education Research” with Routledge. He received his MEd from the University of Missouri-Columbia and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He currently serves as the regional editor of the “Bloomsbury Education and Childhood Studies” series of Bloomsbury Publishing and editor of the SAGE Special Collection entitled “The Evolving Landscape of Qualitative Research: Embracing the Potential and Navigating the Challenges of Artificial Intelligence.”
Dr. Eryaman’s dedication to advancing knowledge extends beyond his own scholarship. He serves as the managing editor of the “Educational Policy Analysis and Strategic Research,” and has curated impactful edited volumes like “Evidence and Public Good in Educational Policy, Research and Practice” and “International Handbook of Progressive Education.”