ISCI Awards 2026

Prof. Jill E. Korbin is the Lucy Adams Leffingwell Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. She is widely recognized for advancing the field of child indicators by bringing cultural, contextual, and interdisciplinary perspectives to the study of child wellbeing. As a cultural anthropologist and child wellbeing scholar, she has helped shape understanding of how children’s lives are influenced by family, community, neighborhood, and cultural environments, emphasizing that indicators of child wellbeing must be interpreted within their social and cultural contexts. Her work has been particularly influential in linking measures of child wellbeing to issues of child maltreatment, neglect, poverty, and community conditions, demonstrating that child outcomes are shaped not only by individual or family factors but also by broader social environments. 

Prof. Sharon Goldfeld is Professor of Paediatrics at The University of Melbourne, Director of the Centre for Community Child Health at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, and Theme Director in population health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute. She has transformed child policy and practice in Australia by developing some of the country’s most influential child health and development monitoring systems. Her leadership in the Victorian Child and Adolescent Monitoring System and the national Children’s Headline Indicators has provided governments with robust frameworks to track child wellbeing and inform evidence-based policy. Through her contributions to the Australian Early Development Census and initiatives such as the Kids in Communities Study, Restacking the Odds, and Future Healthy Countdown 2030, she has demonstrated how population data can be translated into targeted action, helping communities, service providers, and governments identify developmental vulnerabilities, reduce inequities, and improve outcomes for children.

Dr. Bestagno graduated from the Department of Psychology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her research—focused on children’s and adolescents’ subjective well-being, particularly in Latin American contexts, emphasizes the importance of incorporating children’s own perspectives into the measurement and understanding of well-being, advancing child-centered approaches to indicator development. Through studies examining how children and adolescents define well-being, the role of schools and communities in shaping positive outcomes, and the experiences of migrant youth, she has helped generate evidence that complements traditional objective indicators with children lived experiences and perceptions.