Governance:

Professor Maria Slowey

HERC is led by Professor Maria Slowey, Director of Higher Education Research and Development in the Office of the Vice-President for Learning Innovation, Dublin City University, where, from 2004 to 2009 she was Registrar and Vice-President for Learning Innovation.
She has held senior academic leadership and managerial positions in Ireland (DCU 2004 to present), Scotland (University of Glasgow 1992-2004), and England (University of Northumbria 1984-1992). Her career has particularly focused on research-led innovation in higher education, widening access, internationalisation and lifelong learning.

Educated in UCD and TCD, Maria’s research and policy interests draw on sociology, public policy and education to address issues of governance and management in higher education, patterns of participation in higher education, equality of opportunity and widening access to lifelong learning opportunities, comparative tertiary education policy, the participation of adults in education and training, and the role of the university in the community. She has written extensively on these issues and has acted as a consultant to a range of bodies internationally, including OECD, UNESCO, the EC, the Council of Europe, the European Training Foundation, the European Association for Education of Adults, the Swedish National Board for Higher Education, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, the US Advisory Council on Continuing Education.
For more information please see Maria’s staff page
A Working Group of experts from different disciplines across DCU and collaborating institutions advise on the development of the centre

Associated researchers:

HERC’s current Visiting Research Fellow is Professor Mark Morgan.

Professor Mark Morgan

Professor Morgan was appointed as the first Creagan Professor in St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. His  scholarship can be categorized under four broad headings: motivation and job satisfaction, substance misuse and prevention, literacy, and educational disadvantage, and are derived from his training and experience as primary teacher and social psychologist. Recognising the need for a scholarly programme tailored to meet the needs of Irish educational leaders whose fields of practice were under-researched, Mark has attracted substantial funding from Atlantic Philanthropies. This enabled him to establish at St Patrick’s College what has become an innovative Doctor of Education programme. It was the first of its type in Ireland and a measure of its success is that his prototype has been widely replicated throughout the Irish university sector. Already many of its graduates are following Mark in making substantial contributions to new and emerging areas of scholarship related especially to primary education.

Professor Morgan is working with Professor Slowey on a Process Study of the Development of the DRHEA.

Dr. Ekaterina Kozina

Dr. Ekaterina Kozina is a full-time postdoctoral researcher at HERC, DCU. Educated in MIREA (Moscow Technical University), 1999-2005, she completed her PhD in Sociology of Education in Trinity College Dublin (School of Education), 2006-2010. Her thesis "Exploring the Socialisation of Newly Qualified Primary School Teachers in Ireland", a large scale mixed method research, involved analysis of 480 questionnaire responses and 52 in-depth interviews on a variety of aspects of professional experiences of beginning teachers. The study focused on the following areas: i) The most frequent aspects of socialisation experiences encountered in the first teaching year; ii) Effects of initial teacher education on teachers' socialisation experiences; iii) Similarities and differences in professional experiences across particular work settings and iv) The role of different agencies in the professional experiences. Principal research interests lie in the broad area of higher education and lifelong learning. Research interests also include curriculum in higher education; college effects on students; professional lives and professional development of practitioners (eg. teachers, academics).

Dr. Emma Murphy

Emma Murphy is a postdoctoral researcher at HERC, DCU and the Centre for Inclusive Technology, NCBI (www.cfit.ie). She recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the School of Computing at DCU working with Dr. Dónal Fitzpatrick on the SFI funded project “Barrier Free Access to Mathematics for Visually Impaired People” investigating methods of enhancing access to mathematic equations for visually impaired users through non-speech sound. She completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Multimodal Interaction Lab at McGill University, Montreal in the area of perceptual validation of audio and haptic cues. In November 2007 Emma successfully defended her PhD at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queens University Belfast. Her doctoral thesis concerned a design methodology for developing non-visual methods for interacting with the Internet through audio feedback as part of a Multimodal Internet Access Project for visually impaired users. Emma is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin where she originally studied Music and Philosophy. Her research interests include sound design for auditory interfaces, perceptual testing, audio-haptic cues for multimodal interactions and accessibility issues in education and user interaction design.

Dr. Fiona Smyth

Dr. Fiona Smyth (TCD School of Education) has acted as a consultant researcher on HERC’s early activities. Fiona is a researcher and research project manager in social and educational research and her PhD (Sociology) is from the University of Edinburgh. She has led two major national studies: Assessing the impact of higher education on learners’ skills for the Higher Education and Training Awards Council (HETAC) in Ireland, and the Young People’s Reading Study at the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature (NCRCL), UK.

HERC is expanding its research capacity. Please see the Opportunities page for details.

International Advisory Board

The development of the centre is supported by the expert input from members of an International Advisory Board.

Professor Kjell Rubenson, Director, Centre for Higher Education and Training, University of British Columbia,Vancouver, Canada

Professor Rob Cuthbert, Director, CAMPUS, University of West of England, UK

Professor Robin Middlehurst, Director, Higher Education Policy and Practice Network, Kingston University, UK.

Professor Mike Osbourne, Director, Centre for Research and Development in Adult and Lifelong Learning, Glasgow University, Scotland.

Professor Andra Wolter, Professor of Higher Education Research, Humboldt University, Berlin

Professor Agnieska Bron, Professor of Adult Education, Stockholm University, Sweden

Dr John Douglass, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Study of Higher Education, UC Berkeley, California.

Professor Shinichi Yamamoto, Director, Research Institute for Higher Education, Hiroshima University, Japan.

Professor Shirley Walters, Director, Division of Lifelong Learning, University of Western Cape, South Africa.