Dr Hamish Coates is a Principal Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research, appointed in February 2006 to lead ACER’s research on higher education. He has designed and led a large number of projects that have influenced research, policy and practice.Dr Coates' research and publications focus on the definition, measurement and evaluation of educational processes, contexts and outcomes. Active interests include student learning and engagement, higher education policy, large-scale educational evaluation, university pedagogy, online and distributed education, quality assurance systems, and assessment methodology. Dr Coates joined ACER from his position of Senior Research Officer at Graduate Careers Australia (GCA). Prior to GCA, Dr Coates worked for several years at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) and the Assessment Research Centre (ARC) at the University Melbourne. He has held visiting fellowships at the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan, and at UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP). Hamish has taught statistics, psychology and research methods for several years. He currently teaches the subject Large-scale Survey Research as part of the Masters of Assessment and Evaluation at the University of Melbourne.He completed his PhD in 2004 at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Melbourne. His dissertation Student Engagement in Campus-based and Online Education: University Connections was published by Routledge in 2005.