H.E. Mr. Sheldon Shaeffer, Director,UNESCO Bangkok, Asia and Pacific Regional Bureau for Education

Sheldon Shaeffer is currently Director of UNESCO's Asia and Pacific RegionalBureau for Education, located in Bangkok.  A citizen of Canada, he was educated in history (B.A.), anthropology (M.A.), and comparative international education (Ph.D.) 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.  He was also for 10 years the Director of Education and Population Programmes for the International Development Research Centre in Canada and later was a senior research fellow at the International Institute for Educational Planning (UNESCO) in Paris.  Before moving back to Bangkok two years ago, he was chief of UNICEF's global education programme in New York.