Dr. Roberta Ruggiero, PhD is the Director of the Children’s Rights Academy. She is also the Academic Coordinator of the Children’s Rights European Academic Network (CREAN) at the University of Geneva’s Centre for Children’s Rights Studies (CCRS). Formerly she was the scientific coordinator of the European Network of National Observatories on Childhood (ChildONEurope), Istituto degli Innocenti (2008-2013), Florence, Senior Lecturer at the University of Padua, and External Professor of children’s rights at the University of Molise, Italy.

Dr. Ruggiero holds a PhD in Children’s Rights Promotion and Protection awarded by the University of Molise, an MA in law from the University of Molise, an MA in human rights and democratization from the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratization (EIUC), Venice, Italy, and a Certificate on Public Policy Analysis from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), United Kingdom.

Her publications and research interests in the interdisciplinary field of children's rights studies focus on the implementation and monitoring of the international public law dedicated to children’s rights, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, independent child rights institutions, legal and social indicators for and impact assessment of evidence-based childhood policy, comparative policy analysis, multi-level governance implementation of children's rights, knowledge brokering and the development of interdisciplinary continuing education in international and national children's rights. Dr. Ruggiero is a Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal on Child Maltreatment: Research, Policy and Practice (Springer), and a Member of the International Advisory Board of the International Journal of Children's Rights (Brill). She is also a member of the Working Group on National Child Maltreatment Data Collection of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse & Neglect (ISPCAN).

Dr. Ruggiero is the Scientific Coordinator of the Master of Advanced Studies in Children's Rights (MCR), the Co-Director of the Summer School ‘Children’s Rights at the Heart of Human Rights’. She also teaches, as invited lecturer, in the Maîtrise universitaire interdisciplinaire en droits de l'enfant (MIDE) (Interdisciplinary Master in Children's Rights), and other national and international programmes offered by other academic entities.