Linda Harrison is a Professorial Research Fellow in the School of Education, Macquarie University and Adjunct Professor of Early Childhood, Charles Sturt University, Australia.
Linda’s early childhood career began as a parent in playgroups, and a teacher in Occasional Care, and Family Day Care, which led to a life-long interest in quality education for children under 3. Linda was one of the lead researchers for the original the 2021-22 Update of Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (EYLF V2.0) and My Time Our Place: Framework for School-age Care. Linda is also known for her contribution to the design of the child care and early education components of Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, and her leadership of collaborative research projects undertaken with ACECQA, state governments, and early childhood education and care organisations.
Linda’s expertise includes her role as Non-Executive Director, Board of KU Children’s Services.
Sandie Wong is a Professor of early childhood within the Macquarie School of Education, Co-Deputy Director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood Education, Macquarie University, and a Research Fellow with Goodstart Early Learning.
Sandie has worked as an academic, manager, researcher, evaluator, educator, consultant, and nurse, within a range of early childhood, academic and health organisations. Sandie works in collaborative, strengths-based ways, with academics from a range of disciplines, early childhood organisations and practitioners, and governments, to lead and support high quality research, evaluation, and practitioner enquiry, that contributes to best practice in early childhood. Her current work investigates: early childhood practices; workforce issues; educator well-being; and the history of early childhood internationally.
Sandie is a Director on the Boards of Northside Community Services and SPLAT maths.
Sandie is co-leading the case study component of the ORICL project.
Sheena Elwick is a Senior Lecturer in Early Childhood Education (ECE) within the School of Education at Charles Sturt University.
Sheena’s ECE career started over 20 years ago as a preschool teacher in a long day care service. Since then she has worked as a teacher and educational leader in different ECE settings, including mobile childcare where she worked with infants and toddlers (in mixed-age groups). Sheena was a member of the national consortium involved in the 2022 Updates to the Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia and My Time Our Place: Framework for School Age Care. She currently supports ECE service directors, coordinators, teachers and educators to reflect on and implement the updates into their practice.
Sheena’s research interests are diverse as they are driven by her strong collaborative relationships with industry stakeholders and a focus on producing applicable, useful and practical outcomes to context-specific issues. As well as being a member of the ORICL team, Sheena is currently working closely with Aboriginal Communities to develop new understandings of how to embed Aboriginal perspectives into practice. Sheena is also involved in a collaborative project focused on the environments of residential care for young children.
Magdalena Janus is a Professor at the McMaster University (Canada) Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences and Offord Centre for Child Studies where she holds the Ontario Chair in Early Child Development.
Since joining the Offord Centre for Child Studies at McMaster in 1997, Magdalena, together with the late Dr. Dan Offord, developed the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a measure of children's readiness to learn at school entry. This initiative has generated interest at national and international levels, from academic and social policy perspectives. Magdalena and her team support the implementation of the EDI in Canada, and its adaptation in many international sites, including Australia where its adaptation is known as Australian Early Development Census (AEDC). Magdalena is also an Affiliate Professor at the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia, where she collaborates with the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP). For the last 15 years, Magdalena's interests also included the development and early experiences of children in their first three years of life. With colleagues at HELP, she has been involved in the research on the Toddler Development Instrument in Canada, and with the WHO on the Global Scales for Early Development (GSED), a new and innovative tool to measure development of very young children globally. She is an active educator, being directly involved in teaching, supervising, or tutoring students, as well as in the development of new curricula, with special relevance to early child development.
Susan Irvine is an early childhood teacher with diverse work experience across early childhood education and care (ECEC) contexts. This includes senior leadership roles in child and family policy, ECEC service provision and higher education. She is currently a Professor and Head of the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Prior to starting at QUT, she was the CEO of Lady Gowrie Queensland. Susan has led and contributed to multiple large-scale mixed-methods research projects with policy and practice implications. Recent projects have focused on the ECEC workforce, effective leadership in long day care and family day care and quality improvement in long day care. She was a lead researcher in the Australian Learning Frameworks Update project, which informed the updated Early Years Learning Framework and MY Time Our Place (2.0). Susan applies a range of qualitative research methods, and has extensive experience working in multi-disciplinary teams with education partners on research projects that include the development of professional learning programs and resources to effect practice change.
Rebecca Bull is a Professor in the Macquarie School of Education, Macquarie University.
Rebecca’s research is inter-disciplinary in nature, drawing on methodology, theory, and practice in the fields of education, cognitive science, and psychology. In the area of early childhood development, Rebecca is interested in how young children think about number and quantity, and how these basic skills (often referred to as number sense) support growth in mathematical skills.
Rebecca’s research also looks at the important environments in which children are learning and developing – the home environment and the classroom. This has included a focus on the informal numeracy interactions that may happen between children and parents, as well as the pedagogical approaches to numeracy that educators use in day care environments, and the quality of educator-child interactions. Research findings from these studies have been used to examine early risk indicators of later mathematical difficulties and have informed the development and implementation of classroom-based intervention.
Belinda Davis is a Senior Lecturer and the Course Director for Early Childhood in the Macquarie School of Education, Macquarie University.
Belinda is passionate about early childhood education and care and the central role of relationships in young children's lives. Belinda's teaching and researching focus is on pedagogy and curriculum in early childhood settings by exploring ways that children's experiences shape their learning and development.
Her specific research interests include: The Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF); infants and toddlers; low socio-economic status children and families; reflective practice; quality; assessment.
Sheila Degotardi is a Professor of Early Childhood Education and the Director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood Education (CRECE).
Sheila is a committed infant-toddler researcher, whose research aims to support high quality infant-toddler professional practice. With a deep interest in relationship-based pedagogies, she investigates the nature of social interactions between children, their educators and peers, to consider how these interactions contribute towards very young children’s learning. Her work helped inform the development of the revised EYLF, V2 in ensuring this document is inclusive of all young children and their educators.
Peter Humburg is a statistical consultant at the Mark Wainwright Analytical Centre, UNSW. Peter is an experienced research statistician with strong analytical skills and expertise in method development and data analysis.
Kate Williams is a Professor of Education at the University of the Sunshine Coast.
Kate is a developmental scientist, intervention designer, evaluator, and leader, working at the intersection of health and education to address inequities that often arise from early childhood. She is recognised as an international expert on social-emotional, self-regulation, executive function, cognitive, and sleep development, and the parenting, educational, and intervention contexts that support such. Kate typically uses large population datasets, program design and evaluation, and modern quantitative and mixed method approaches across her research program. Kate is also a Registered Music Therapist and so is interested in the ways that music can be used to support development and wellbeing. Her ARC DECRA fellowship saw Kate develop the effective Rhythm and Movement for Self-Regulation (RAMSR) program, which has been commercialised and is disseminated internationally to diverse adults working with young children. Core to Kate’s approach are collegial team-building across disciplines, and collaborative relationships with research end users in community, industry, government, and non-government organisations. She brings strong stakeholder engagement and a focus on capability building, implementation science, knowledge translation, and research impact to every research project she undertakes.
Kate’s expertise includes her role as Chair of the Board for Play Matters Australia.
Tracy Redman is the research Project Manager for ORICL supporting the work of the early childhood researchers. Tracy has almost four decades experience in the early childhood sector, including as owner/teaching director of a long day care service for 16 years, overlapping with over twenty years teaching EC students from certificate III to master’s degree levels. Her special research interest is in supporting educators to enrich their language interactions with infants and toddlers through targeted professional development. With three master’s degrees, Tracy has now completed her PhD studies at Macquarie School of Education and is a Graduate Research Student member of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood Education (CRECE).
Helen Fitzgerald trained as an early childhood teacher and has since added play therapy to her practice. She has worked in many early childhood service types including out of school hours settings with children and their families.
For 10 years Helen has worked in inclusion support; training, resourcing and supporting Commonwealth funded children's services staff in the Albury region to successfully include children with diverse needs, children from diverse backgrounds and Aboriginal children into their services. She has also been a casual lecturer at TAFE and at CSU, Albury.
Anne-Lii Hardy is an experienced senior research assistant and research manager, having worked on major research projects including a longitudinal study of infants' language and learning. For over ten years, she has supported and managed early childhood research projects, being actively involved in the collection, management and analysis of data, project management and administration. Anne-Lii completed her Master of Research degree at Macquarie University in 2018, focusing on young children's use of technology and its impacts on their cognitive skills.
Engaged by the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology, Kathryn joins the ORICL research project team as a research assistant after thirty years committed to supporting educators across various regional and remote kindergartens, primary schools, school age care services, family day care services and universities. As an ACECQA approved qualified early childhood teacher, she holds a Master of Human Services (Childhood Studies) and a Master of Learning Management. Kathryn continues to support early childhood research projects, the coordination of early childhood undergraduate and postgraduate tertiary units of study and collaborated with the Central Queensland University School of Education and the Arts writing team, in the implementation of their new Master of Teaching Early Childhood course. As a university academic, responsible for the research, development and implementation of pre-service units, her aim has been to encourage early childhood pre-service teachers to consider the ethical and social justice implications of their work within educational settings.
Brian Ballsun-Stanton is a solutions architect with over 8 years designing and delivering technical solutions for academic and student research projects at the Macquarie University Faculty of Arts and UNSW Australia. He has been a Chief Investigator in grants and prizes across the humanities and social sciences.
Simon O’Toole is the Head of Research Data & Software at Australian Astronomical Optics (AAO), Macquarie University. He has 25 years of experience managing research data and providing technical management for a large range of projects across many research disciplines.
Kate Sheng is a Research Software Engineer with years of experience designing, developing, and delivering web/app applications from RDS at Australian Astronomical Optics (AAO) at Macquarie University.
