Dr Asmaa Al-Fadala

Dr. Asmaa Al-Fadala is the Director of Research and Content Development at WISE, an initiative of Qatar Foundation. She is also a visiting fellow in the Department of School Education and Policy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA, and serves on the program committee of Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s School of Public Policy.

Dr. Al-Fadala has twenty years of professional experience in K-12 education and higher education. In her current work at WISE, Dr. Al-Fadala is leading the research team in support of the QF CEO’s Office in a number of projects and initiatives, including the Empowering Leaders of Learning Program (ELL), which supports school leaders in navigating school improvement processes; the Agile Leaders of Learning Innovation Network (ALL-IN), an international network of school leadership experts and practitioners aimed at raising awareness of educational leadership policy globally through research and advocacy; and the WISE-Academyati Innovation Lab Project, an early childhood education research initiative of Qatar Foundation focused on learner and educator development in progressive school settings.  Dr. Al-Fadala’s research interests include leadership for learning, school improvement, entrepreneurship education, teacher professional development and educational reform.

Prior to joining WISE in 2014, Dr. Al-Fadala was an associate policy analyst at the RAND-Qatar Policy Institute. She has also taught in the College of Education at Qatar University, and worked at Qatar’s Ministry of Education and Higher Education as a teacher and then as the head of the science department. She is also a fellow at Qatar Leadership Centre (QLC), an initiative of His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, Amir of the State of Qatar. She is widely published in the field of educational leadership and policy, and author of the book Qatari School Leadership Portraits: Lessons Learned from Education for a New Era Reform (HBKU Press, 2019). 

Dr. Al-Fadala is a member of the Comparative International Education Society (CIES), and the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI). She also serves as an advisor for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s education strategy and is a board member at Qatar Academy Sidra school in Doha. She is also a jury member for Riyada award, the Entrepreneurship Award in Oman. She is a board member at the Diplomatic Courier. Dr. Al-Fadala holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. from Cambridge University, UK, in Educational Leadership and Policy, and an M.A. in science education from Brighton University.