Dr. Jan Sadlak is the Vice-President for International Collaboration at Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland. From 1999 to 2009 Jan Sadlak served as Director of UNESCO - European Centre for Higher Education (UNESCO-CEPES) in Bucharest and Representative of UNESCO in Romania, since September.  Prior to this appointment, he was Chief of the Section for Higher Education Policy and Reform in UNESCO, Paris. In more than twenty-five years of experience in the field of higher education, he has held teaching and research positions in leading universities and research institutions in Poland, Canada and the United States.

Dr. Sadlak holds an MA degree in economics from the "Oskar Lange" Academy of Economics in Wrocław, Poland, and a Ph.D. in educational administration from the University of Buffalo/State University of New York at Buffalo, USA.   He was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor honoris causa) from the following universities: "Babes-Bolyai" University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania; "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu, Romania; the State University of Management in Moscow, Russian Federation; the National Technological University of Ukraine "Kiev Polytechnic Institute" in Kiev, Ukraine. He has been awarded a title of the Honorary Senator (Senator honoris causa) of the University of Maribor, Slovenia.

Dr. Sadlak served as a team-leader for implementation of joint or co-funded projects with international governmental organizations such as The World Bank, European Commission, OECD, and the Council of Europe as well as non-governmental organizations and foundations. He has been a team-leader for institutional evaluations and has conducted a number of advisory missions. He is frequently involved in project assessment and peer-review evaluations.  He is a Member Correspondent of the European Academy of Arts, Sciences and Humanities - Academia Europensis, Paris, France, and a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, San Francisco, USA. He is an Honorary Member of the Black Sea University, Romania. 

He received a number of other high academic awards and national distinctions, among them the Order of Merit at the Rang of Commandos by the President of Romania.  He has been actively involved in the functioning of various international academic organizations, such as the Standing Conference of Rectors, Presidents and Vice-chancellors of the European Universities - CRE, Geneva, Switzerland; the Salzburg Seminar Universities Project, Salzburg, Austria; and International Association of University Presidents (IAUP). He is a founding member of the International Rankings Expert Group (IREG).

Dr Sadlak is the author of several books and numerous articles on higher education and science policy as well as on processes of reform and transformation in higher education and research in Central and Eastern Europe. His work includes: a book, jointly edited with Ulrich Teichler, entitled Higher Education and Its Relationship to Policy and Practice (IAU and Elsevier Science/Pergamon, 2000), as well as a book entitled Knowledge Café for Intellectual Entrepreneurship Through Higher Education (Warsaw: "Leon Kozminski" Academy for Entrepreneurship and Management, 2003), [jointly edited with Stefan Kwiatkowski], a monograph on Doctoral Studies and Qualifications in Europe and the United States: Status and Prospects (Bucharest: UNESCO-CEPES, 2004).

His most recent work is related to the phenomenon of university rankings and "the world-class university" and he has co-edited, with Nian Liu, a book entitled World-Class University and Ranking: Aiming Beyond Status (UNESCO-CEPES, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Cluj University Press, 2007).