Prof Liesel Ebersöhn
Executive Editor: South African Journal of Education
Secretary General: World Education Research Association
Director: Centre for the Study of Resilience
Full Professor: Department of Educational Psychology
Liesel Ebersöhn is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Resilience and Full Professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education, University of Pretoria. She is a National Research Foundation-rated researcher, a registered educational psychologist and has received several awards for her research in Education and Educational Psychology. In 2012 she won the prestigious second position in the coveted Women In Science Award (Distinguished Researcher category) of the South African Department of Science and Technology. Early in her career as academic she won the Exceptional Young Researcher Award of the University of Pretoria and the Emerging Researcher Award of the Education Association of South Africa.
A former Director of the Unit for Education Research in AIDS, and current institutional leadership as the Chair of the Ethics Committee (Faculty of Education), she has also been an Associate Professor and Research Fellow respectively at Yale University’s Department of Psychology and Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in AIDS, and Visiting Professor at the Fogarty Learning Centre, Edith Cowan University. She has read keynote papers and has been invited to present lectures across the globe on themes related to her research niche (combining emancipatory- and intervention research to investigate resilience as a human-ecological adaptive response to chronic and cumulative adversity characteristic of an emerging economy country in transformation).
She is currently the Secretary General of the World Education Research Association, Executive Editor of the South African Journal of Education and serves on the Executive Council of the Education Association of South Africa. She is one of few education researchers who were nominated to and accepted as an ASSAf (Academy of Science of South Africa) member.
Liesel has published prolifically with more than 70 peer reviewed articles and book chapters, and more than 60 master’s and doctoral students in Education and Educational Psychology completing their studies under her supervision. She has co-authored several books (Partnering for Resilience, Life Skills & Assets), co-edited others (Lifeskills & Career Counselling, Keyes to Educational Psychology) and been the editor of another (From Microscope to Kaleidosope).