Dr. Kate Tilleczek

Professor, Canada Research Chair (Tier I),
Founder & Scientific Director of YLRL

Kate Tilleczek is a Professor who holds the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Youth, Education & Global Good in the Faculty of Education at York University.  She is an educator, founder (in 2009) and Director of the Young Lives Research Laboratory which employs global, intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches to collaborative research with and for young people and their communities. The objective is to better understand and record how youth navigate challenges arising in contemporary local/global contexts (e.g. ecological degradation, digital technology, climate change, mental wellbeing). Professor Tilleczek has developed many innovative, youth-centred research processes and findings on these topics and put them to use in re-imagining quality education. She is currently developing a Partnership for Youth and Planetary Wellbeing to investigate emerging social, educational and digital challenges for youth wellbeing, particularly within the social and economic context of the COVID pandemic. Working across countries and cultures with holistic models of wellbeing and ecological systems thinking, Professor Tilleczek’s research garners new understanding about the wellbeing of young people and how we might re-design quality education and whole-of-society supports with/by them.