Dr. Stuart McNaughton holds a personal chair as Professor of Education at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and is the Director of the Woolf Fisher Research Centre at the Faculty of Education. He has been recently appointed to a visiting position of Distinguished Overseas Professor at East China Normal University, Shanghai. His research interests include the development of literacy and language, the role of culture in development, and the design of effective educational programmes to overcome educational disparities.

He chairs and contributes to national bodies in New Zealand providing advice on educational policies, and has developed educational assessments and resources for New Zealand schools. He consults on the design of curricula and educational interventions nationally and internationally. In 1983 he was awarded the Albert J. Harris award by the International Reading Association, following doctoral studies at the University of Auckland and the University of Kansas. He is a member of the International Reading Association’s Literacy Research Panel. He is active in professional organisations including as an associate editor of the American Educational Research Journal, and has been editor and associate editor of journals such as Culture and Psychology and the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy and was a member of the editorial advisory board of Reading Research Quarterly. He has been the President of the New Zealand Association for Educational Research and Head of Department and a Dean at the University of Auckland. He received the honour of Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (2011), and in 2014 was appointed to the position of Chief Education Scientific Advisor to the New Zealand Ministry of Education.

His books include Designing better schools for culturally and linguistically diverse children: A science of performance model for research (2012); Meeting of minds (2002); Patterns of emergent literacy: Processes of development and transition (1995); and Being skilled: The socializations of learning to read (1987). He has contributed chapters to numerous books, including Handbook of Research into Children’s Literacy, Learning and Culture (2013); International Guide to Student Achievement (2012); Handbook of Research on Teaching the English Language Arts (2011); Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Vol. 2., (2005); and to theoretical and practical journals, including Reading Research Quarterly, The Reading Teacher, Language Arts, Journal of Educational Psychology.