REAL Centre Associate Members

Associate members of the REAL Centre are external collaborators who make valuable contributions to our research projects and broader strategic work.

Dr Samuel Asare: Senior Research Manager at Education Sub Saharan Africa (ESSA). Interested in higher education, students' learning experiences and use of context-driven evidence for improving education in sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr Monazza Aslam: Education economist; children's learning outcomes and teacher effectiveness in India and Pakistan.

Dr Paul Atherton: Economist by background, educationalist by experience: Interested in how education leads to inclusive growth; how education systems perform, and how donors and programmes interact with them to improve outcomes; the role of non-school inputs and the shadow education system in generating system change.

Dr Stephen Bayley: International education and child development; skills for adaptability including creativity and problem solving; socio-emotional learning and wellbeing; child psychology and executive function, especially cognitive flexibility; learning in sub-Saharan Africa; play and early childhood development; and mixed methods (using Stata and NVivo). Wider interests include: education quality; gender; pedagogy; 21st century skills and non-state schooling.

Dr Aditi Bhutoria: Quantitative researcher interested in the design, delivery and impact of educational policy and interventions across countries. Fields of interest: Economics of Education, Technology, and Public Policy. Topics: Education, Human Capital Development, Impact Evaluation, Social Science Methods, Field Experiments, International Large-Scale Assessments.

Shelby Carvalho: Based at Harvard University and a previous visiting scholar with the REAL Centre and contributor to the RISE Ethiopia project. Key areas of interest include refugee education; the political economy of education; and international aid.

Dr Marcos Delprato: Based at the University of Sussex. Expertise on the application of quantitative analysis in the field of international education and development, with a focus on issues related to educational disadvantages in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr Phoebe Downing: Girls' education; school and political leadership; inclusion, gender, and diversity; comparative and international education; Sub-Saharan Africa education research; qualitative data analysis; programme monitoring and evaluation.

Dr Aliya Khalid: Qualitative research; oral histories; gender and inclusion; gender in education and development processes; women’s agency; women’s collective thought; family studies; capability; epistemic justice and Southern epistemologies. Work focuses on gender and ethnic minority experiences of education (pre- and post-Covid) in Pakistan and the UK context.

Dr Janice Kim: International and comparative education; education reform and policy; educational inequalities and equity; specialised in quantitative data analysis and economics of education; early childhood development; teacher professional development; school improvement and effectiveness; education technology and digital innovation; education governance and finance.

Dr Rabea Malik: Qualitative and mixed methods researcher interested in: inequalities in education - including investments in the early years, experiences of and trajectories through schooling and life outcomes; and education systems reform to improve service delivery - specifically around teachers, school leaders and middle tier bureaucrats.

Dr Akanksha A. Marphatia: Use of longitudinal biomedical studies to investigate developmental and geographic origins of inequality in educational attainment; professional experience in international macroeconomic, education and gender policy.

Dr Rafael Mitchell: Lecturer in Comparative and International Education and co-director of CIRE at the University of Bristol. Schooling and school improvement in African and low- and middle-income countries, leadership and pedagogies for inclusive education, and inequalities in knowledge production in education. Joined the REAL Centre in 2017 to develop the African Education Research Database, long history of collaboration with REAL Centre colleagues. Full profile.

Dr Shenila Rawal: Applied economist specialising in education, political economy analysis and issues of gender and poverty. Extensive experience using quantitative evaluation methods to analyse large-scale secondary data sets; collection and analysis of primary quantitative and qualitative data; designing and implementing randomised control trials in education.

Dr Laura Savage: Known for her thinking on the politics of education aid and how systems practice could enable improvements to education outcomes. Executive Director of the International Education Funders Group, the largest global network of philanthropic education funders. Prior to this Laura worked at the UK FCDO, where she built the education research portfolio including the RISE programme, and for AusAID Bangladesh and UNICEF Malawi.

Dr Garima Sahai: Working across departments at the University of Cambridge; gender, work and employment, young people, public policy, and development practice in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, especially India; interdisciplinary lens, primarily employing qualitative methods. Garima Sahai full profile

Dr Matt Somerville: Educational psychologist and lecturer at UCL Institute of Education. Supporting children’s mental health and well-being; emotion and emotion regulation; teacher-pupil interactions and relationships; inclusive classroom practices; metacognition and self-regulation.

Dr Naveen Sunder: Assistant Professor of Economics at Bentley University (Waltham, MA). Applies economic and statistical tools to analyse policy-relevant questions. Economics of education, quantitative analysis, impact evaluation, using large scale household/school surveys and primary data collection.

Dr Louise Yorke: Qualitative, quantitative and participatory methods; the political and socio-cultural factors influencing education access and equity; gender and education; education and migration; school-to-work transitions; the research-practice-policy nexus.

Dr Lydia Whitaker: Social and emotional development across childhood; Mixed methods research; Gender equality; Teacher effectiveness, quality education for all in Pakistan and India.