Professor Joseph Lo Bianco is the associate dean for Global Relations and Knowledge Transfer, and chair of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Melbourne's Graduate School of Education.

Professor Lo Bianco's recent areas of interest and scholarship include global English, English in China; the expansion of Chinese and the use of Chinese as a medium of instruction; public discourse and social harmony, literacy, romanization and script change in Vietnam; as well as country specific language policy research with PhD students in East Timor, Laos, Italy, the UK, the US and Australia.

Professor Lo Bianco is best known as the author of the 1987 National Policy on Languages, adopted as a bipartisan national plan for English, Indigenous languages, Asian and European languages, and Interpreting and Translating services and now used worldwide as a model of rational language planning.

Professor Lo Bianco has been an invited short-term consultant on constitutional language planning in many settings: post-Apartheid South Africa; language education in the US State of Hawaii; integration of Muslim immigrants in European Schools for the Council of Europe; indigenous and foreign languages in Alberta (Canada); Chinese teaching in the state of Alberta (Canada); official English and heritage languages in the United States for the several national organizations and agencies; Tamil and Malay in Singaporean language education; bilingual literacy in Western Samoa and eight other Pacific Island countries; culture and intercultural education for the Japan Foundation; Cantonese and English medium in Hong Kong schools; the Goethe Institute and the French Ministry of Education of shared language policy; the integration of Asian immigrant children into schooling in Tuscany, Lombardy and the Veneto regions of Italy.

In 1999 he wrote the National Language Education plan for the Government of Sri Lanka under World Bank financing as part of the peace negotiations in that country. During 2000-2002 he was commissioned to provide language policy advice in Scotland; in 2001 he was invited to work with the Northern Ireland Department of Education on language and multiculturalism as part of the Good Friday Peace Agreement. He has been invited to contribute to policy development on languages for the European Year of Languages 2001 and the Council of Europe (2003) and to the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games from 1997-2000. This work was used for both the Athens 2004 Olympics but more substantially for London 2012 and was the subject of an invited presentation in London in March 2006.

Professor Lo Bianco was a member of the Australian National Commission for UNESCO for ten years. He set up the Melanesian Literacy Project as part of the International Literacy Year in 1990, the Manual for Indigenous Literacy in SE Asian countries in 1997 and the Manual on the role of English in Sri Lankan intercultural policy for the British Council in 2002.