Joanne Mulligan is Professor of Education specialising in mathematics and STEM education from early childhood to secondary level. Joanne's background is in educational psychology, primary teaching and professional leadership. She has expertise in the psychology of mathematics education, specialising in research in early mathematical development and learning, pedagogy, assessment and curricula. Her 27 years of service to Macquarie University includes pre-service teacher education program teaching, development and co-ordination, supervision of Higher Degree Research students, and Associate Director of the Centre for Research in Mathematics and Science Education (CRiMSE) from 2004-2009. More recently Joanne led the $2.3m Opening Real Science (ORS) Project (2013- 2017) a collaborative cross-institutional project focused on improving primary and secondary teacher education programs under the Australian Government's Enhancing the Training of Mathematics and Science Teachers' scheme (ETMST).

Joanne's research spans cross- and interdisciplinary fields including cognitive and developmental psychology, learning sciences, special education, educational measurement, professional development and teacher education. Since appointment to MQ, she has been awarded successive ARC and stakeholder-funded projects on the development of number and multiplicative reasoning, early algebraic and spatial thinking, represented by large-scale empirically-based longitudinal designs and a range of mixed methodologies.

Joanne is renown for her contribution to the profession through state, national and international curriculum reviews and projects including Count Me In To, Counting On, Numeracy Research in Primary Schools, the Australian Government Quality Teacher Program (AGQTP), the Australian School Innovation in Science, Technology and Mathematics (ASISTM), the Enhancing Success in Mathematics project (ESiM), and Top Drawer Teacher. The impact of the Pattern and Structure Assessment (PASA) and the Pattern and Structure Mathematics Awareness Program (PASMAP) (2003-present) for early mathematics has been achieved at system, national and international level. She actively contributes to international groups in mathematics education such as her recent role as co-chair of the Early Childhood Mathematics Education Group for the International Congress on Mathematics Education 2013-2016, Hamburg (ICME-13) and as the Australasian representative to the International Commission for Mathematical Instruction Study Group 23 (ICMI23) committee, 2014-2017.

Joanne currently leads ARC Discovery project, Connecting Mathematics Learning with Spatial Reasoning (2017-2020) in Grades 3-5 informed by her participation in the International Spatial Reasoning Study Group (IOSTEM, University of Calgary). She is also mathematics education lead on ARC Discovery project, Enriching Mathematics and Science Learning: An Interdisciplinary Approach in Grades 1- 6 through Deakin University.