Widya Ratna Kusumaningrum undertakes her PhD program in applied linguistics and technology at the Iowa State University of Science and Technology, focusing on language competency testing and assessment.

She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in  English teaching from Universitas Negeri Semarang and a second master’s in curriculum and instruction from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Widya is a lecturer at Universitas Tidar in Magelang, Central Java, where she hopes to establish a Language Testing Research Centre and start a bi-annual journal focusing on language testing and assessment.