Amandip and Duna
Left to right: Amandip Bisel and Dr Duna Sabri

Amandip and Duna will be joining a group of higher education sector representatives who provide guidance on decisions affecting our research programmes.

TASO has Theme Working Groups for each research theme we adopt. The groups offer advice and recommendations relating to their relevant research areas and consist of a mix of practitioners, evaluators, researchers and administrators.

Dr Duna Sabri, Director of the Academic Development Fund at the University of the Arts, London

Duna

 

Duna took up her role at UAL in December 2018. She started her career as a researcher at Royal Holloway’s Centre for Ethnic Minority Studies and Equal Opportunities Unit before embarking on ten years in educational development at the University of Oxford. After completing a part-time doctorate on the assumptive worlds of academics and higher education policy makers she taught on two Masters courses in Education and began another ten years as a freelance researcher working on a range of policy problems using quantitative and qualitative methods. She was commissioned to conduct institutional research by six universities with diverse missions and co-authored a national HE research review on inequality in students’ outcomes.

Her publications and institutional research projects have focused on the interplay between institutional structures and social inequality.  Her current writing addresses the causes of inequality in students’ degree outcomes.  She has an association with the Centre for Public Policy Research at King’s College London, as Visiting Research Fellow.

Amandip Bisel, Lecturer in Student Success at St George’s, University of London

Amandip Bisel

 

Amandip is a Lecturer in Student Success at St George’s, University of London where her remit includes leading the institution’s work on reducing differential outcomes, with a particular focus on the experience of students from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds.  Amandip has worked in a range of Higher Education Institutions in roles supporting equality in student access, participation and success.  She is also currently writing up her Doctoral thesis at Imperial College London focusing on the challenges of widening access in medical education which takes a mixed methods approach to investigating the full student lifecycle.

  • TASO’s Theme Working Group members have responsibility for reviewing the current evidence base on a given research theme, reviewing applications into TASO commissioning rounds, making recommendations for funding awards and monitoring funded projects.
  • We currently have two Theme Working Groups. The first group focuses on the Effectiveness of Widening Participation Outreach and the second on Examining Gaps in the Student Experience.