Kathe Kirby is Executive Director of The Asia Education Foundation and Asialink at The University of Melbourne – Australia’s largest Asia–Australia Institute.

Kathe has a long background in education having worked as a secondary school teacher, university lecturer in education and as a senior policy officer in the Department of Education, Victoria, prior to joining Asialink in 1993 to run the Asia Education Foundation (AEF). The AEF is a national strategy to lead and promote the studies of the countries of Asia in Australian school curriculum. Kathe’s expertise focuses on leading change and innovation in education.

Over her career she has worked at the cutting edge of student focused learning, the use of ICT in schools and vocational education. In 2001 Kathe was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to investigate studies of Asia in schools in the US, UK, Japan and Korea. The work of the AEF has been recognised internationally as world’s best practice in developing curriculum that prepares children for an interconnected world in which the Asian region will increasingly play a central role. In 2007, Kathe was nominated as an education finalist in the The Bulletin’s Smart 100.