Webinar: Meet the funders: Jacobs Foundation research opportunities and fellowship program

Keynote: Advancing Evidence-Based Learning Opportunities For Every Child: Introducing the Jacobs Foundation Research Agenda and Research Fellowship Program

The Early Career Scholars Committee is pleased to announce a special WEBINAR dedicated to ECSs, but also of general interest to the whole Community. The webinar will cover how to effectively apply research findings within international organizations, focusing on the Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship Program.

Our keynote speaker will be Gelgia Fetz Fernandes, Co-Lead of the Learning Minds Portfolio for the Jacobs Foundation. As part of the leadership team, she develops the Minds portfolio towards improving the level of collaboration and influence among Jacobs Foundation-supported researchers, the level of researchers’ influence on practice, and the level of researchers’ influence on policy. She was instrumental in setting up the Jacobs Foundation’s Klaus J. Jacobs Awards, the Research Fellowship Program, CRISP, and the LEAP program. Before joining the Jacobs Foundation in 2007, Gelgia worked as a trained newspaper journalist, covering events and stories national and international in scope. In that role, she reported out of Tel Aviv, where she finished her studies in Social Anthropology and focused on the political socialization of Israeli youth.

Gelgia holds a graduate degree from Zurich University, where she studied Social Anthropology, Media Studies, and International Relations with an emphasis on the Middle East.

Additionally, Stephen Asatsa, Pamela Wadende, and Ivy Kesewaa Nkrumah will also take part in the discussion by sharing their experience as successful past applicants.

Stephen Asatsa is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the Catholic University of Eastern Africa. He holds a PhD (Counseling Psychology) from the Catholic University of Eastern Africa. His research interests include Personality Psychology, Thanatology, and Indigenous Knowledge systems in Psychology. He is a member of the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development (ISSBD) and the Society for
Research in Child Development (SRCD). He serves on the governing council of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD).

Pamela Wadende is a Developmental Psychologist at Kenya’s Kisii University, school of education and human resource development. Her interest is how children acquire behaviour and how it develops over their lifespan. A current research focus is creating child-friendly preschool environments and experiences in rural areas of Africa. A Global Challenges Research Fund (UKRI/GCRF) grant will help complete one of these projects in rural Kenya and Zambia. She is the co-director of the ISSBD/Jacobs Foundation African professional development fellowship that brings together 10 fellows from six different African countries for professional development and networking opportunities. She is also starting a Templeton World Charity Foundation-funded peace-building project in Lokichoggio among adolescents involved in livestock rustling.

Ivy Kesewaa Nkrumah is a lecturer at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. She has worked with non-governmental organizations, as well as universities, and she has been actively engaged in research, teaching, and mentoring of students. She has a great passion for educational research and has applied her expertise and competencies to support the successful implementation of several community-based programs that promote education. Her current project with the Jacobs Foundation aims to identify a good model of language education at the lower school level for policy improvement in Ghana and other low and middle-income multilingual countries.

Our discussant will be our ISSBD President, Prof. Tina Malti, whom we thank very much.

We thank our keynote speaker, Dr. Gelgia Fetz Fernandes, and our guests, Stephen Asatsa, Pamela Wadende, and Ivy Kesewaa Nkrumah, for graciously sharing their expertise and experience.

Warm regards,

Cinzia Di Dio, Given Hapunda, Lilian Ayiro, Ella Daniel, Federico Manzi, Zelma Mokobane, Yao Sun.