Plenary Speakers

Stéphane Bouchoucha is an Associate Professor in Nursing and Associate Head of School (International) in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Deakin University. Stéphane joined the School of Nursing and Midwifery in April 2015. Prior to this Stéphane had over 20 years of experience in the clinical setting and facilitating the learning of both undergraduate and post-graduate nursing and midwifery students in Australia, Hong Kong, the UK and Singapore. Stéphane research program has a focus on Infection Prevention and Control. Stéphane is the president of the Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control (ACIPC) the peak body for Infection Prevention and Control professionals in the Australasian region.

Jennifer Alford is an Associate Professor of language and literacy education at the School of Education and Professional Studies (EPS), Griffith University, Queensland, Australia. She is Deputy Head of School – Research in EPS, and is Deputy Director of the Griffith Institute of Education Research. She has been a qualitative researcher and teacher educator for 24 years in English as an additional language/TESOL and English curriculum and pedagogy, literacy, and intercultural studies. Her publications include a book based on her PhD: Critical Literacy with Adolescent English Language Learners: Exploring Global Policy and Practice in Global Contexts, the co-edited 50-chapter Handbook of Critical Literacies, and over 50 high quality journal articles and book chapters. She is an Australian Research Council (ARC) DECRA research fellow (2021-2024) investigating critical literacy in subject English classrooms with migrant and refugee-background youth in and out of school. She has supervised 12 higher degree research students to completion, with 3 winning Outstanding Thesis Awards, and currently supervises 6 in various areas of English language/literacy curriculum, teaching & learning.

Dr. Hemantha K. J. Ekanayake, having 20+ years of experience as a Central Banker, currently holds the position of Director, of the Statistics Department of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL). She has also served as Additional Director and Deputy Director in the Statistics Department, Senior Economist in the Economic Research Department of CBSL, and as a Monitoring Officer at the Ministry of Plantation Industries, Sri Lanka. With a solid academic background, she earned her MSc degree in International and Development Economics and PhD degree in Economics from the Australian National University in Australia. With her research interest in the fields of International Economics, Macroeconomic Modeling, and Econometrics, she has published several research papers in international and local journals, including IMF working papers and CBSL staff studies.

Josephine Moate, Docent of Language in Education and Senior Lecturer in Bilingual and Multilingual Pedagogy, is based in the Department of Teacher Education at the University of Jyväskylä. A focal area of Josephine’s research concerns teaching and the importance of language in education – whether as a multimodal resource, a subject in the curriculum or a mean for experiencing and exploring the wider world, as well as self-other relationships. Much of Josephine’s research has been informed by the dialogism of literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin and Josephine’s current research interests in particular draw on the notion of the chronotope, arts-based methodologies and the imagination.

Rajeev Amarasuriya is the Immediate Past Secretary of the Bar Association of Sri Lanka and has an extensive Appellate Court practice in the areas of Public Law and most branches of Civil Litigation including contractual, commercial, property, taxation, banking and other disciplines of the law. Mr Amarasuriya is a Board / Committee Member of several State and Private Sector Institutions including the Sri Lanka Accounting and Auditing Standards Monitoring Board, the Standing Committee of Legal Studies of the UGC and is a Council Member of the University of Colombo. He is also the Sri Lanka Country Representative of the Commonwealth Legal Education Association and an Executive Committee Member LAWASIA.
He is a former Member of the Council of Legal Education of Sri Lanka chaired by the Honourable Chief Justice, which is the governing body of the Sri Lanka Law College, a former Commissioner of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Sri Lanka, former Member of the Board of Governors of the Sri Lanka National Arbitration Centre and the Immediate Past President of the Alumni Association of the University of Colombo. He holds a Degree in Law from the University of Colombo, is an Attorney-at-Law of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka having topped the Final Bar Examination, is a Fellow Member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (UK), a Fellow Member of the Institute of Certified Management Accountants of Sri Lanka and is an Alumnus of the Harvard Kennedy School (Executive Education). In April 2022, he was conferred as an AFGG – Raisina Fellow. In 2013 he was the recipient of the CIMA Star Gold Award for the Most outstanding CIMA Member below the age of 40 years and was named as a CIMA – LMD Trailblazer in 2021.

Dilanthi Weerasinghe is a registered community, educational, and child psychologist with the Health and Care Professions Council (UK), currently serving as a Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. With a BSc in Psychology (Hons) from the University of Manchester (U.K), and postgraduate professional qualifications in (i) Educational Psychology from the University of Southampton (U.K) obtained in 1992 and (ii) Education, Health Promotion and International Development from the Institute of Education, University College London, she brings over three decades of extensive experience as an applied psychologist in the field, working in the public sector and independent (not-for-profit) sectors.

Dilanthi has dedicated her career to supporting inclusive education and working with children and young people with complex social, emotional and learning needs. Her professional journey has spanned diverse cultures and communities, working in London (UK), Singapore, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia, Tanzania, and the Seychelles. With over 20 years of senior leadership and operational management experience in the public sector, she has played a pivotal role working with policymakers and supporting families, teachers, schools, pre-school centres and community organisations. Her expertise has included strategic leadership and management of Local Authority educational psychology services in London and the Ministry of Education, Republic of Singapore, research projects with the Ministry of Education, Singapore and various public sector initiatives in the U.K. that focused on improving educational and mental health outcomes for children and young people. A key aspect of her work has been around building partnerships and multidisciplinary teams with education, health and social care services, and the co-design, development and evaluation of initiatives that aim to increase access to psychological services for marginalised, minority and vulnerable groups.
Dilanthi has a long held professional interest in service design, promoting equity and access to psychological services, advocating for culturally responsive practice and parental and service user engagement. She is currently conducting research into community driven educational psychology services with University College London.