Dr. Roberta Ruggiero, PhD is the Director of the Children’s Rights Academy. She is also the Academic Coordinator of the Children’s Rights European Academic Network (CREAN) at the University of Geneva’s Centre for Children’s Rights Studies (CCRS). Formerly she was the scientific coordinator of the European Network of National Observatories on Childhood (ChildONEurope), Istituto degli Innocenti (2008-2013), Florence, Senior Lecturer at the University of Padua, and External Professor of children’s rights at the University of Molise, Italy. 

Dr. Ruggiero holds a PhD in Children’s Rights Promotion and Protection awarded by the University of Molise, an MA in law from the University of Molise, an MA in human rights and democratisation from the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratization (EIUC), Venice, Italy, and a Certificate on Public Policy Analysis from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), United Kingdom. 

Her publications and research interests in the interdisciplinary field of children's rights studies focus on the implementation and monitoring of the international public law dedicated to children’s rights, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, independent child rights institutions, legal and social indicators for and impact assessment of evidence-based childhood policy, comparative policy analysis, multi-level governance implementation of children's rights, knowledge brokering and the development of interdisciplinary continuing education in international and national children's rights. Dr. Ruggiero is a Member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal on Child Maltreatment: Research, Policy and Practice (Springer), and a Member of the International Advisory Board of the International Journal of Children's Rights (Brill). She is also a member Member of the Board of the Institut International des Droits de l'Enfant (IDE) Foundation and the Terre des hommes Foundation (Tdh).  She is also a member of the Working Group on National Child Maltreatment Data Collection of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse & Neglect (ISPCAN).

Dr. Ruggiero is the Co-Director of the Master of Advanced Studies in Children's Rights (MCR), of the  Certificate of Advanced Studies in Children's Rights (CCR) and of the Summer School ‘Children’s Rights at the Heart of Human Rights’. She also teaches, as a Senior Lecturer (Maître d'enseignement et de recherche (MER)), in the Maîtrise Universitaire Interdisciplinaire en Droits de l'Enfant (MIDE) and other national and international programmes offered by other academic entities. On 20 January 2024 Dr. Ruggiero was awarded the UNESCO Janusz Korczak Medal by the Maria Grzegorzewska University, Warsaw, Poland, in recognition of her ongoing support for implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals 4, 5 and 10, especially for promoting human rights and children’s rights in higher education.