ProfessorLy Tran

Ly Tran is a Professor in the School of Education, Deakin University. She is an internationally recognised academic in international education, with influential research spanning student mobilities, public diplomacy, geopolitics of international education, graduate employability, education-work-migration nexus, teacher professional learning and the internationalisation of teaching and learning. Ly is also widely recognised for her expertise in internationalisation of higher education in Asia, particularly in Vietnam. She leads the Australia-Vietnam Enhanced Economic Engagement Strategy (EEES) - Internationalisation of Higher Education project, funded by the Australian Government Department of Education and co-hosted with Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training. She is project lead for the Best Practice in International Student Engagement project, funded by the Australian Government under the International Education Innovation Fund, producing a Virtual Map and series of Good Practice Guides to support international students in Australia. Ly is the founder of Australia-Vietnam International Education Centre and leader of the International Student Graduate Employability Research Group. She also serves as a mentor in the Young Australians in International Affairs mentoring program, Deakin Mentoring Program and is a member of advisory boards for a range of professional and government agencies.

Ly has been a CI in six Australian Research Council grants, including a DECRA and a Future Fellowship, on the New Colombo Plan - Australian student mobility to the Indo-Pacific as public diplomacy, international students, education-work-migration nexus, student mobility, geopolitics of international education, internationalisation of teaching and learning and teacher professional learning.

Ly has received 50 awards and accolades for her research and contribution to capacity building, policy, practice and commentary on international education, including:

• Vice-Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Graduate Research Supervision, 2026
• Outstanding Reviewer Award in the 2025 Emerald Literati Awards
• Distinguished Alumni Award, Aus4Skills, Australian Embassy in Vietnam, 2025
• Named as one of Australia and ASEAN 'Top 50' voices on international education 2023, The PieNews
• Named as one of 20 Top International Education Influencers, Edruptor 2023.
• Inaugural Melbourne Asia Game Changer Award by the Asia Society Australia for her work on enriching Australia-Asia connections
• Inaugural Noam Chomsky Global Connections Award
• International Education Association of Australia's (IEAA) Excellence Award for Professional Commentary in International Education (2021)
• Named in Elsevier and Stanford's list World Top 2% scientists every year since 2020
• Highly Commended Award in the 2019 Emerald Literati Awards
• International Education Association of Australia's Excellence Award for Best Practice/Innovation in International Education 
• Readers’ Choice - Most-read article in the Education section of the Conversation in 2020, reaching over 214,000 readers.
• Named as one of Vietnam’s 50 most Influential Women 2019 by Forbes Vietnam (Research-Education Category)
• Vice Chancellor’s Mid-career Researcher Award for Research Excellence 2017.

She has authored/co-authored more than 300 publications across a diverse range of scholarly, policy and public-facing outlets, including books, peer-reviewed articles, Good Practice Guides, think pieces, media articles, government-commissioned reports and industry discussion papers. Her co-edited book, International Student Connectedness and Identity: Transnational Perspectives, received the Honorary Award in the 2019 Best Book Award category of the Comparative International Education Society (CIES) Study Abroad & International Students SIG.

Ly has been invited to give over 100 public lectures, keynote and plenary talks at a range of national and international conferences, industry forums, community seminars and government roundtables on international education, public diplomacy and geopolitics of international education, international student experiences, teacher professional learning, internationalisation of the curriculum, teaching and learning, inbound and outbound student mobilities, the New Colombo Plan, graduate employability and education in Vietnam.

Her work has been featured in over 110 media outlets in multiple languages in Australia and internationally, such as the ABC, SBS, the Australian, Australian Financial Review, the Age/SMH, Times Higher Education, the Saturday Paper, Xinhua, China Daily, East Asia Forum, VNExpress, Thanh Nien and VietnamNet. She has regularly written commentaries for newspapers, including the Australian, ABC, Australian Financial Review, SBS, the Canberra Times, the Conversation, University World News, PIENews, Lowy's The Interpreter & Campus Review.

Ly is Deputy Editor for the International Journal of Intercultural Relations, former co-editor (2017-2022) for Higher Education Research and Development and founding co-editor for Emerald book series: International Perspectives on Education, Employability and Work. She is a member of Deakin's Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Centre, Faculty of Arts and Education Faculty Board, and member of Academic Board and an affiliated faculty member of the Centre for Higher Education Internationalisation, Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. She is a Visiting Professor at Phu Xuan University, Vietnam, Vietnam National University HCMC - University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Toyo University, Japan and Hitotsubashi University, Japan. She was also an Honorary Research Fellow (2015-2018), at University of Chester, England. She is the Vice-chair of IEEE Task force on Educational Data Mining, affiliated with the Data Mining and Big Data Analytics Technical Committee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.