Selina McCoy

Selina is Associate Research Professor in Social Research and joint education research coordinator at the ESRI, and Adjunct Professor at Trinity College Dublin. She has over 25 years of experience with responsibility for research and evaluation projects in the fields of inequality, academic achievement and student development. Dr McCoy has experience on a wealth of national and cross-national studies addressing diverse education topics. These include quantitative and qualitative research studies examining school effectiveness, student engagement and achievement, early school leaving, experiences of students with additional needs and the role of digital technologies in education.

For the last 12 years, Dr McCoy has been the Irish national expert at the European Commission Independent Experts in Education and Training. Selina was also a member of the 15-member European Commission Expert Group on Quality Investment in Education and Training. She recently led a Peer Counselling programme, guiding curricular reform in Poland.

Among her current projects, Dr McCoy is coordinator of a major research programme with the Department of Education and Youth. Dr McCoy is also collaborating with EU colleagues on a Horizon Europe project examining educational inequality in Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Hungary.

She has published extensively on education topics, including articles in Work, Employment and Society; Higher Education; Distance Education; Research in Social Stratification and Mobility; International Journal of Inclusive Education; American Behavioral Scientist; British Educational Research Journal; British Journal of Educational Psychology; Studies in Educational Evaluation; Pediatric Research; Economics of Innovation and New Technology; and Oxford Review of Education, amongst others.