Announcing the 2026 EAIE Doctoral Research Grant awardees
As part of our commitment to investing in research initiatives and innovative ideas that play an essential role in advancing international education, the EAIE launched the Doctoral Research Grants programme in 2025. Following the success of our inaugural cohort, we were delighted to return for a second year and continue supporting emerging researchers whose work has the potential to shape the future of the sector. The 2026 EAIE Doctoral Research Grant awardees have now been selected from another strong and diverse pool of applicants from around the world. Meet the researchers behind this year’s winning projects and explore their work.
Jovana Ablotia
Jovana Ablotia is the Head of the Student Service Centre at Caucasus International University (Georgia) and a PhD Candidate in Political Science. Alongside her administrative role, she contributes to quality assurance in higher education and international accreditation as a student expert. She is a member of the European Students’ Union (ESU) Quality Assurance Student Experts’ Pool for the 2025-2026 mandate and, through this role, has contributed to international accreditation procedures conducted by EVALAG. Jovana has more than a decade of professional experience in higher education administration, quality assurance and student services. Her academic interests include higher education policy, internationalisation, political socialisation and quality assurance.
Area of research:
With the support of the 2026 EAIE Doctoral Research Grant, Joana is undertaking the empirical phase of a research project investigating how internationalisation in higher education shapes democratic values, civic engagement and institutional trust in transitional societies. The project contributes to broader discussions on the role of education in political socialisation and democratic development.
Gabriela Bravo Vargas
Gabriela Bravo Vargas is a Colombian anthropologist and doctoral student at the Università di Padova, Italy, in the PhD programme in Scienze Pedagogiche, dell’Educazione e della Formazione. She holds a Master 's degree in Cultural Pluralism, Social Change and Migration. Her academic and professional trajectory has been shaped by a commitment to inclusive education, social justice, intercultural dialogue, and participatory approaches to knowledge co-production. With experience across academic, informal, and community-based contexts, she has been involved in teaching, research projects, and initiatives focused on social impact.
Area of research:
Gabriela’s doctoral research is situated in the Amazonian triple border between Colombia, Brazil, and Peru. It combines anthropological, sociological, and educational perspectives to critically examine the practices, contributing to more equitable, participatory, and socially engaged approaches to education. The findings can inform more context-sensitive, intercultural, and decolonial approaches to internationalisation in higher education, and inspire practices that recognise diverse forms of knowledge and student agency.
Eglis Chacon
Eglis Chacón Camero is a doctoral candidate in higher education at Boston College, where she investigates the distribution of international aid in higher education beyond scholarships. Her research interests include forcibly displaced people and refugees in higher education, as well as international higher education. Prior to her studies at Boston College, Eglis worked as a policy analyst at the UNESCO International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, where she contributed to global research on the internationalisation and financing of tertiary education, including co-authoring the 2022 UNESCO IESALC report Exploring International Aid for Tertiary Education, one of the few systematic analyses of aid architecture in the sector.
Area of research:
Eglis’sdoctoral research aims to develop a more comprehensive understanding of international aid in higher education by analysing non-scholarship aid flows. It tracks the movement of funds through networks of actors to uncover beneficiaries, losers, and the functioning of financial systems. For practitioners and policy-makers, this offers actionable intelligence: which donor strategies have historically invested in institutional capacity versus individual mobility, which recipient countries have received consistent support, and how strategic patterns have evolved.
Siro Pina Cardona
Siro B. Pina Cardona is a PhD student in the Higher Education program at Boston College. His research interests encompass international higher education development, multi-stakeholder partnerships, and education and training policy. In particular, he examines how internationalisation initiatives and innovative teaching and learning approaches can foster positive social change. He has held internship positions across multiple international organisations and NGOs, including the OECD, UNITAR, Ashoka, and the International Association of Universities, and is currently a Research & Teaching Assistant at the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. He holds degrees in Psychology, Health Sciences, and Educational Studies, including the Erasmus Mundus Master’s in Research and Innovation in Higher Education.
Area of research:
As an EAIE Doctoral Research Grant awardee, Siro will continue to explore multi-stakeholder partnerships in the internationalisation of higher education for society (IHES) within and beyond academia. His research will consider how IHES can be conceptualised through a systemic approach, who the key actors are shaping IHES governance, and how they collaborate within and across stakeholder groups and regions. It will also consider how these actors perceive and quantify their influence on one another.
Vastav Ratra
Vastav Ratra is an MRes/PhD candidate in Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests lie at the intersection of development economics, environmental economics, political economy, and the economics of science. Before joining LSE, Vastav worked as a pre-doctoral researcher at the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi and as a research consultant on development and public policy projects in India. He holds an undergraduate degree from BITS Pilani.
Area of research:
Vastav’s doctoral research examines how universities, migration, and international education shape the production of scientific knowledge. His EAIE-funded project examines whether English-taught programmes in non-Anglophone universities influence the geographic and thematic orientation of research in the biological and agricultural sciences. By combining large-scale bibliometric data with survey evidence from PhD students, the project asks whether internationalisation in higher education can help diversify whose places, ecosystems, and species are studied in global science.
Ready to make an impact through your research?
The EAIE will launch another round of doctoral research grants in early 2027, building on the momentum of our successful first and second cohorts. At a time of significant change for international education, we remain committed to investing in research that generates new perspectives and emerging priorities in Europe and beyond.
