Professor Barry O’Sullivan OBE FAcSS FAALA is the British Council’s Head of Assessment Research & Development. He has worked on numerous test development and validation projects globally and advises ministries and institutions on assessment policy and practice. He has undertaken research across many areas on language testing and assessment and its history and has worked on the development and refinement of the socio-cognitive model of test development and validation since 2000. He has presented his work at many conferences around the world, while almost 100 of his publications have appeared in a range of international journals, books and technical reports. He is the founding president of the UK Association of Language Testing and Assessment, holds a visiting professorship at the University of Reading, UK, and is Advisory Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He was awarded Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK in 2016 and was elected to Fellowship of the Asian Association for Language Assessment in 2017. In 2019 he was awarded an OBE by the government of the UK for his contribution to language testing.