In early November, Professorial Fellow Barry McGaw was elected President of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences.

This week, Professor Joseph LoBianco was elected President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the oldest of the Academies.

Dean of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education Professor Field Rickards, says: "It is a wonderful achievement for Professors McGaw and LoBianco to be recognised in this way.  Both their contributions to academia have been outstanding and we are privileged to work alongside them here in the Graduate School.

"It is a testament to the high calibre of our work at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education that we can house two such highly regarded Professors."

Barry McGaw has been Director of the University's Melbourne Education Research Institute since 2006. Previously he was Director for Education in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) based in Paris, and earlier served as Executive Director of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).

In January this year, he was appointed executive director of an international multi-sector research project aimed at transforming global educational assessment and improving learning outcomes.

The project which is being conducted through the University of Melbourne is a collaboration by three leading technology companies - Cisco, Intel and Microsoft - designed to develop new assessment approaches, methods and technologies for measuring the success of 21st-century teaching and learning in classrooms around the world. Educational leaders, governments and other corporations have been called on to join in the effort.

Joseph Lo Bianco is Chair of Language and Literacy Education in the MGSE, and Associate Dean (Global Relations and Knowledge Transfer).

He is best known as the author of the 1987 National Policy on Languages, adopted as a bipartisan national plan for English, Indigenous languages, Asian and European languages, and Interpreting and Translating services and now used worldwide as a model of rational language planning.

Professor Lo Bianco has published more than 30 books and major reports, as well as over 120 journal articles and book chapters.