Dr. Jesus Alfonso (Jess) D. Datu is a well-being scientist and Associate Professor of Guidance and Counselling and Gifted Education in the Academic Unit of Human Communication, Learning, and Development (HCLD) in the Faculty of Education at The University of Hong Kong. He also serves as the Director of the Centre for Advancement in Inclusive and Special Education. Jess uses cross-sectional, cross-cultural, cross-temporal, online experimental, and intervention designs in exploring psychological factors and interventions that promote mental health, academic success, and inclusive attitudes towards students with special needs. Further, he investigates how socio-emotional competencies matter for optimal talent development outcomes in gifted individuals. He has over 130 publications on studies related to the application of positive psychology, inclusive education, giftedness, and STEM education.

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He has received a number of international awards and recognitions based on his scientific impacts in different disciplines. He has been included in the list of The World's Top 2% Researchers Based on Scientific Impacts Across All Disciplines in 2019 (see Ioannidis et al., 2020 to access the full list of scholars), 2020 (see Baas et al., 2021), 2021 (see Ioannidis, 2022), and 2022 (Ioannidis et al., 2023), and 2023 (Ioannidis, 2024). In addition, he received the 2020 Outstanding Reviewer Award from the School Psychology International editorial leadership team. In March 2021, he has been named Researcher of the Month by Tooled Up Education. In January 2022, he was named an APS Rising Star, an award that recognizes outstanding psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their research career post-PhD whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contribution, by the Association for Psychological Science. In 2022, he ranked 1st out of 8681 scholars in the discipline of special education from 2017-2021 by the Scholar GPS, a database of eminent authors whose top percentage ranks places them in the top 0.05% of all scholars due to their scholarly contributions for the past 5 years. He was a recipient of the 2023 The Michael Harris Bond Award for Early Career Research Contributions by the Asian Association of Social Psychology. In July 2024, he received The Tom Oakland ISPA Outstanding International Scholar Award, a research award "offered annually by the International School Psychology Association (ISPA) to a member who has demonstrated exemplary scholarship contributing to international school psychology association that merits special recognition."