Lucian Ciolan

Lucian Ciolan is one of Romania’s most distinguished scholars and policymakers in the field of adult education. He has significantly influenced and enriched scholarship, policy making, and practice through his research and development work on continuing teacher education, training of teachers, and adult vocational training. Over the past twenty-five years, he has become a reference in continuing teacher and adult education in Romania and beyond for his model of adult learning and training that integrates learning research and the cognitive sciences. He has helped implement more than forty adult education programs, reaching participants from more than sixty countries worldwide.

Ciolan is based at the University of Bucharest in Romania. He has taught at the university as a professor of educational policy and research in the Department of Educational Sciences since 1998. After four years as a department director and eight years as a dean, he became vice-rector of development projects and lifelong learning at the university in late 2019. His primary areas of interest are public and educational policies, research methodology, training of trainers, and the application of (neuro)cognitive sciences in public policies and learning processes. He contributes his expertise to a variety of national agencies in education and research, including as a member of the board of Romania’s National Quality Assurance Agency in Higher Education.

One of Ciolan’s most notable contributions to the field of lifelong learning is his introduction and consolidation of adult and continuing education as a field of study and research in higher education in Romania. He designed and accredited the first training of trainers master’s degree programs in the country. These promote professionalism in adult learning programs design and delivery and advance research and development in continuing teacher education and vocational training. Ciolan also designed and delivered more than three thousand hours of courses for a variety of beneficiaries, with a focus on groups at risk: former communist countries, Roma communities, immigrants, authoritarian regimes, and rural areas, in regions ranging from Central and Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Central Asia.

Combining research, policy capacities, and practical training initiatives, Ciolan served at the core of a team that initiated, over the past twenty years, large-scale programs for capacity building in the field of policymaking. The initiative’s efforts ultimately reached sixty countries. It started in Budapest and became an independent nonprofit, International Centre for Policy Advocacy (ICPA), based in Berlin, with Ciolan as one of the founding members and senior trainers.

Ciolan is the author of four books and coauthor of another ten, as well as author of numerous articles and book chapters. He is a sought-after public speaker at international conferences. He has provided consultancy, training, and advising on adult and continuing education in a variety of settings over the past twenty-five years, including in the Republic of Moldova, Poland, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, and Portugal.

Ciolan is president and founder of the Romanian Educational Research Association. In 2024 he became secretary general of the European Educational Research Association, the largest and most prestigious community of scholars in the field of education in Europe. In 2023 he received the Excellence Award from Excellence Gala “Together We Protect Romania” (third edition), awarded to the most influential individuals contributing to the transformation of Romanian society.