Isabella Rega holds a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences and an Executive Master degree in Intercultural Communication from the Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI). Her PhD dissertation dealt with the role of telecentres in socio-economic development.
She currently works for Bournemouth University (BU) and for the Jesuit Worldwide Learning: Higher Education at the Margins (JWL) initiative. At BU she is Associate Professor in Digital Media for Social Change in the Faculty of Media and Communication, Deputy Head of CEMP – Centre of Excellence in Media Practice, Head of its Media and Digital Literacies Research Cluster and member of the Civic Media Hub. At JWL she is Global Research Director, and she leads the research efforts of the organisation on the impact of Higher Education on marginalised communities around the globe and on the effectiveness of digital technologies to deliver high-quality educational experiences.
Formerly she worked as Post-Doc researcher at the London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education, University of London, working on a project about mobile learning for Community Health Workers in Kenya (mCHW). Before moving to UK, Isabella was the executive director of the NewMinE Lab at USI and of the CROSS-FIELD Pro*Doc and has been involved as project manager in several ICT4D projects, focusing on eLearning and access issues, in South Africa, Brazil and Mozambique.
Isabella has worked in telecentres, as researcher and instructor, in Jamaica, Burkina Faso, Benin, Guinea and South Africa, and collaborated as an online teacher for a distance learning university in Colombia.
She co-founded Associazione seed, a non profit organization promoting the use of educational technologies in the non profit sector.