ProfessorJaclyn Broadbent

Professor Jaclyn Broadbent is an award-winning educator, internationally recognised higher education researcher and senior university leader whose work is driven by a deep love of teaching and learning. At the heart of her career is a simple belief: students have the best chance to thrive when the academics who teach and support them are also able to thrive.

As Pro Vice-Chancellor Academic Experience at Deakin University, Jaclyn leads university-wide transformation of the academic workforce. She shapes the systems, cultures and career structures that support academics to do their best work—and, ultimately, enable students to experience an outstanding education. For Jaclyn, academic workforce reform and student success are not separate agendas: they are profoundly connected.

This belief has guided her leadership of some of Deakin’s most significant academic workforce reforms, including the Academic Workforce Program, the University’s decasualisation strategy, and the creation of new academic roles and career pathways. Her work has included establishing education-focused academic roles, designing contemporary workload models, reforming academic promotion and strengthening employment frameworks for sessional academics. She approaches these initiatives not simply as changes to policy or process, but as opportunities to build a fairer, more sustainable and more inspiring academic environment.

Jaclyn is known as a purposeful, collaborative and deeply engaged leader. She enjoys bringing people together around complex challenges, listening to different perspectives and finding practical ways to turn ambitious ideas into lasting change. Her leadership is grounded in a strong sense of fairness and a commitment to recognising the many ways academics contribute to their students, disciplines and university communities. She is particularly passionate about creating environments in which people have the agency, support and opportunity to grow.

Teaching and learning have always been at the centre of Jaclyn’s professional identity. Her leadership is informed by her own experience as an educator and by her curiosity about how students learn, what helps them persist and succeed, and how universities can create learning environments in which every student has the opportunity to flourish. She has twice been named Deakin Teacher of the Year and has received national recognition through an Australian Award for University Teaching Award for Teaching Excellence and an Australian Awards for University Teaching Citation.

That same curiosity has shaped Jaclyn’s internationally recognised research. With PhDs in both Psychology and Education, she brings together insights from human behaviour, motivation and self-regulation with educational research and academic practice. Her research spans self-regulated learning, assessment and feedback, online and blended education, and effective university teaching. This interdisciplinary perspective allows her to see institutional challenges through both a human and a systemic lens: understanding the experiences of individuals while also addressing the structures that shape those experiences.

Jaclyn is ranked among the world’s top 2% of scientists in the Stanford University–Elsevier rankings. She has published more than 70 journal articles and book chapters, and her research has attracted more than 12,000 citations, with an h-index of 38 on Google Scholar. For Jaclyn, however, research has never been separate from practice. Its value lies in what it can teach us about creating better educational experiences and translating evidence into meaningful change.

Before taking up her current position, Jaclyn held several senior academic leadership roles at Deakin, including Pro Vice-Chancellor Sessional Academic Experience, Deputy Head of School and Associate Head of School (Teaching and Learning). Across these roles—and throughout her work as a teacher, researcher and leader—her purpose has remained constant: to create universities where educators feel valued and supported, where teaching is recognised as vital scholarly work, and where students experience the life-changing possibilities of an excellent education.

www.jaclynbroadbent.com