Sheldon Shaeffer
Director, UNESCO Regional Bureau for Education, Bangkok
Sheldon Shaeffer is the Director of UNESCO's Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education, located in Bangkok. A citizen of Canada, he was educated in history (BA), anthropology (MA), and comparative international education (PhD) at Stanford University. He has taught, done research, and worked in development programmes in Southeast Asia for over 15 years - as a high school teacher in Malaysia, an anthropologist and an education programme officer for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, and the regional education advisor for UNICEF in Bangkok. Dr. Shaeffer was also the Director of Education and Population Programmes for the International Development Research Centre in Canada for 10 years and later was a senior research fellow at the International Institute for Educational Planning (in UNESCO) in Paris. Before moving back to Bangkok, he was chief of UNICEF's Global Education programme in New York.