Marianne Fenech is Director of the Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood) program at the University of Sydney. She has published extensively on the regulation and governing of early childhood services, initial teacher education, and teachers, and the impact this governance has on quality, accessible, and inclusive early childhood education, particularly for families experiencing adversity. Marianne is a strong advocate for the early childhood teaching profession, and co-chairs the Australian Early Childhood Teacher Education Network. Marianne is the TEE study’s Lead Investigator.

Sandie Wong is a Professor in early childhood, Co-Deputy Director of the Centre for Research in Early Childhood Education and on the Executive of the Lifespan Health and Wellbeing Research Centre, at Macquarie University, and Vice President of OMEP (the World Organisation for Early Childhood Education) for the Asia Pacific Region. Sandie works in collaboration with academics from a range of disciplines, early childhood organisations and practitioners, governments and NGOs, to co-design high quality research, evaluation and practitioner enquiry, that contributes to best practice in early childhood education. Her current work is investigating early childhood teacher quality; early childhood practices; workforce issues; and educator well-being; and she is leading an evaluation of UNICEF’s school readiness program in Timor Leste. Sandie is a Chief Investigator on the TEE Project and is leading the development of the TEE Tool.

Susanne Garvis is a professor of early childhood education in the Griffith Institute for Educational Research. She is an internationally renowned expert within policy, quality and learning. Susanne has worked with various governments, professional organisations and NGOs across the world where her research has informed teacher education, policy development and professional learning within early childhood education. She is a mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) researcher with extensive experience in narrative (story constellations) and arts-based research. Her focus is on supporting voice, experience and wellbeing within research. Susanne has extensive research, teaching and leadership experience in early childhood education and teacher education in higher education in Australia and Sweden. She has previously been a Professor at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and a guest professor at Stockholm University (Sweden).

Wendy Boyd is the Associate Dean, Education, in the Faculty of Education, and Associate Professor in Early Childhood Education (ECE), Southern Cross University. In this role she provides academic leadership implementing the ongoing development and continuous improvement of initial teacher education programs that includes ECE, primary and secondary, in the Faculty of Education. Her research focuses on the provision of quality ECE for children’s learning and development.

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.

Ashley is a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) student at the University of Sydney. Ashley completed her Bachelor of Education (Early Childhood Education) at the University of Sydney, graduating with Honours Class I, the University of Sydney Academic Merit Prize, and the Dean’s Excellence in Academic Performance award. She has since published a peer-reviewed article based on her honours research that investigated the role and influence of educational leaders in early childhood settings rated as high-quality.. Ashley is a passionate early childhood teacher and educational leader, having worked across various service types in the birth to five years sector since 2018. She is currently employed at Explore & Develop, where she thrives in inspiring others through workshops, conferences, and her pedagogical leadership. Ashley is an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship candidate whose doctoral work is focused on diploma-qualified educators upskilling to an early childhood teacher qualification.

Dr. Marwa Asbe is a cognitive developmental and educational psychology researcher and quantitative analyst, currently appointed as a Research Associate in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney, and as a Research Assistant in the School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She works on the Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded Teachers in Early Education (TEE) project, contributing quantitative analyses that support research on teacher workforce development and early education.

Marwa earned her BA and MA in Psychology from the University of Haifa, Israel, and completed her PhD in Cognitive Developmental Psychology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her doctoral research examined the development of temporal discounting (a measure of impulsivity) and the cognitive foundations of decision-making across school-age development, including time perception and strategy use.

Alongside her research roles, Marwa has substantial teaching and supervision experience (2012–2023), including teaching quantitative research methods, developmental psychology, educational psychology, and emotional intelligence, and supervising research seminars and graduate projects. She previously contributed to the Mathematics Growth Team (MGT) project at UNSW, funded by the NSW Department of Education, with a focus on quantitative data analysis and journal publications.

Melanie is the post-doctoral research fellow on the TEE Tool Project, a sessional lecturer at the University of Sydney and, an early childhood teacher with 13-years combined experience in Australian and Singaporean early childhood contexts, and in South Korean elementary schools. Melanie’s work in Australian early childhood settings included educational leadership where she led and collaborated with pre-service, early graduate and experienced early childhood teachers and educators on pedagogy and practice across birth to five spaces. Melanie is originally from South Africa where she completed a Bachelors with Honours in Psychology before completing a Master of Teaching in Australia. Melanie’s recent doctoral research, undertaken at the University of Sydney, investigated early childhood teachers’ and educators’ emotional labour and wellbeing experiences in their work with families. During her doctorate, Melanie was awarded a University of Sydney Faculty Teaching Fellowship where she taught early childhood Master’s level and Bachelor level units. Melanie has collaborated with Australian and European early childhood researchers on emotional labour, contributing to a book on emotional labour in early childhood that is due to be published later in 2026. Melanie has also contributed to stakeholder workshops for The Early Childhood Educators’ Wellbeing Project (a Macquarie University project) and is actively interest in educator wellbeing initiatives. Melanie remains interested in the emotional labour that early childhood teachers and educators use in their relational work and the association between this labour and teacher and educator wellbeing. Melanie is a strong advocate for young children’s rights to high-quality education and care and for the early childhood teaching profession.