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ACA Secretariat

Biographical note

Irina Ferencz

Irina Ferencz (née Lungu) is the Director at ACA, the organisation where she also started her professional career in the field of internationalisation of European higher education in 2008. Through her work, Irina has developed a professional interest and an expertise in:

  • student and staff mobility developments (data collection methods, definitions, trends analysis);
  • mobility and/or internationalisation policies at HEIs and national level, including advising HEIs in Central and Eastern Europe in enhancing their internationalisation endeavours;
  • multi-level assessment of internationality, and the development indicators;
  • curricular internationalisation through mobility windows;
  • quantitative development of English-medium instruction in the European context;
  • and increasingly on aspects related to widening inclusion in internationalisation activities.

All in all, Irina is interested in comparative analyses on various aspects of international higher education, her research work having resulted in multiple publications.

Externally, Irina is also a member of the Publications Committee of the European Association for International Education (EAIE) and a reviewer for the Journal of Studies in International Education (JSIE). She is an experienced speaker and moderator, with presence at multiple international higher education events every year, and has served over the years as an advisor in various projects and initiatives, some at European, while others at national level.

She holds an advanced master’s degree in EU policies and politics from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and an undergraduate degree from the Babeş-Bolyai University (Romania) in international relations and European studies. She is currently enrolled as a PhD candidate at the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent (CHEGG), Ghent University, researching internationalisation, identity and organisational change in universities of applied sciences (UAS).

Irina is a Romanian national, despite her Hungarian last name, speaking Romanian (mother tongue), English, French, Italian and a bit of German. She also reads Spanish and masters ‘Larish’, a language of the under-two-year-olds.