PROFESSOR Linda Darling-Hammond, 57, is Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, where she has launched the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute and the School Redesign Network.

Before moving to Stanford in 1998, she taught for a decade at Teachers College at Columbia University. She spent the 1980s in Washington as a social scientist at the RAND corporation, the global policy think-tank.

Before and after graduating from college, she taught in various classrooms and spent a year teaching high school English.

Her research, teaching and policy work focus on issues of school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity.

From 1994 to 2001, she served as executive director of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, a blue-ribbon panel. The panel's 1996 report, What Matters Most: Teaching For America's Future, led to sweeping policy changes affecting teaching and teacher education.

In 2006, this report was named one of the most influential affecting US education, and Prof Darling-Hammond was named one of the nation's 10 most influential people affecting educational policy over the last decade.

She was adviser to President Barack Obama during his campaign and helped draft his ambitious education programme, especially the sections that call for recruiting and training thousands of new teachers each year.

She shares President Obama's respect for the role played by excellent teachers in raising student achievement and was one of two experts who appeared repeatedly as surrogates for him in debates with Senator John McCain's top education adviser during the campaign.

She graduated magna cum laude from Yale, and earned her education doctorate from Temple University. Besides NTU, eight other universities around the world have awarded her honorary degrees.

This article was first published in The Straits Times.