Awarding Committee

W. Steven Barnett is Board of Governors Professor of Education and Founding Co-Director of the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University, United States. He is a member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association. His work focuses on public policies to support early learning and child development, including studies of the economics of early education. Dr. Barnett earned his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Michigan. Dr. Barnett has authored and co-authored more than 200 publications. His best-known work includes the landmark benefit-cost analysis of the Perry Preschool Project in 1985 and othe...

Iram Siraj is a Professor of Child Development and Education, University of Oxford (SRF at Jesus College) and a Research Professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia until the end of 2018; Siraj is on the Technical Advisory Group for the lead Australian Council for Educational Research group, which won the OECD IELS international pilot study (plus NFER England study) on the specialty of child measures. Dr.Iram worked as a preschool, primary, and advisory teacher. For the last 30 years as a researcher and academic with Warwick, London, and Oxford universities. She gained her doctorate in 1995 from Warwick University, and Iram was awarded an OBE for services to ECEC in 2015. As...

Dr. Jana Fleming joined the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Foundation as Director of the Salama Bint Hamdan Al Nahyan Center of Excellence in Early Childhood Development in February 2015. She has extensive experience evaluating the quality of early education programs and services, training teachers on best practices in early education, and advising policymakers on strategies to improve educational and social services for young children and their families. From 2009 to 2015, Dr. Fleming was director of the Herr Research Center for Children and Social Policy at Erikson Institute. Dr. Fleming is a graduate from the School of Child Development located in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Dr. Nirmala Rao Serena H.C. Yang Professor in Early Childhood Development and Education, Professor, Chair of Child Development and Education, The University of Hong Kong   Nirmala Rao is Serena H C Yang Professor in Early Childhood Development and Education, Chair Professor of Child Development and Education, and Director of the Consortium for Research on Early Childhood Development and Education (CORE), Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).  A Developmental and Chartered (Educational) Psychologist by training, her research on early childhood development and education in Asian cultural contexts has been recognised internationally. This work has focused...

Fatima Ahmed Abdullah Al Bastaki works as Cluster Manager, Project Manager of the Chinese Expansion Program in the UAE, and Cluster Lead of Hamdan bin Zayed School (Male and Female Sectors). She has been working in the educational field for 36 years and has accomplished many initiatives that support the educational process and contribute to its development for the United Arab Emirates. Fatima is one of the founders of the First public school in the Emirates that supports a trilingual approach to learning for Emirati students and Chinese citizens. The Ministry of Education has adopted this approach, and Al Bastaki has overseen the expansion of implementing the trilingual curriculum in over si...