Chief Executive Officer of the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa. He holds an M Ed from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and obtained a PhD in Education from the same university in 1996. Before joining the HSRC in September 2015, he was a Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He remains a professor in the School of Education at UCT.

His areas of research interest include: social difference, culture, education policy, comparative education, educational change, public history and popular culture. Prof Soudien's publication record spans the authoring and co-authoring of more than 180 articles, reviews, reports, and book chapters.

His most recent work, published in Pedagogy, Culture & Society, draws on intentionality systems theory to begin a discussion about the relationship between the act of violence and thinking. He is a fellow of a number of local and international academies and serves on the boards of a number of cultural, heritage, education and civil society structures.