The World Education Research Association (WERA) and the National Association of Research and Graduate Studies on Education (ANPEd) are thrilled to share the roster of esteemed keynote speakers for the 2025 WERA Focal Meeting & 42nd ANPEd National Meeting taking place on 26-30 October 2025 at the Educação da Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB), João Pessoa, Brazil.
Prof. Liesel Ebersöhn Prof. Liesel Ebersöhn (Director: Centre for the Study of Resilience, Full Professor: Department of Educational Psychology, University of Pretoria), is a registered educational psychologist, expert on social dimensions of resilience and President of the World Education Research Association President. Her theory, Relationship-Resourced Resilience, draws on Sub-Saharan Africa evidence to describe social-resilience responses to counter chronic adversity (i.e. collective efficacy and -agency responses to disruption that manage finite resources in sustainable ways to support contextually-unpredicted positive education, health and wellbeing outcomes). Through membership and invited engagement in global education and wellbeing platforms, she is influential world-wide in education development circles to inform policy, training and practice for sustainable transformation in the Global South. She has published more than a 130 peer-reviewed articles, as well as monographs, edited and co-authored books, and book chapters, and has supervised over 100 postgraduate students to completion.
Prof. Dr. Marianne Schüpbach is chair in Primary Education at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Schüpbach is an empirical researcher whose research focuses on extended education (all-day school, afterschool, etc.) predominantly in Germany, Switzerland and with an international comparative perspective. In the last years, she has carried out different studies funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the German Research Foundation, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Berlin Ministry of Education in the field of extended education, educational quality, multi-professional collaboration in school and teaching and with a focus on socially disadvantaged students with a migration background. She is the chair of the WERA TASK FORCE Global Research in Extended education. She received her PhD from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland (CH) in 2004 and her Habilitation from the University of Bern (CH) in 2009. From 2010 till 2014 she has been an assistant professor at the Institute of Educational Science, University of Bern (CH) and from 2014 till 2019 she was a chair in Primary Education at the Institute of Educational Science, University of Bamberg, Germany. Since 2019 she is a chair in Primary Education at Freie Universität Berlin.
Prof. Alfredo J. Artiles is Lee L. Jacks Professor at the School of Education at Stanford University in the United States. He is also director of the Research Institute at the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at the same university. His programmatic scholarship engages the questions “how do educational equity remedies create new injustices and what are effective ways to reduce these paradoxes?” Dr. Artiles’ scholarship aims to understand how responses to disability intersections with race, social class, gender, and language advance or hinder educational opportunities for disparate groups of students. Dr. Artiles edits the book series Futures of Disability in Worlds of Difference (Harvard Education Press). He has been appointed to three consensus panels of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and was a member of the White House Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. Dr. Artiles is President-elect of the National Academy of Education, is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a Fellow of AERA and a Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute.