Helen Vallianatos appointed Associate Dean, Education
26 January 2024
The College of Social Sciences is excited to share that Dr. Helen Vallianatos has been appointed the Associate Dean, Education for the College of Social Sciences and Humanities until August 2026, after recently serving as Interim Associate Dean, Education.
A professor in the Department of Anthropology, Dr. Vallianatos has previously served as Acting Vice-Provost and Dean of Students. Prior to that, she served a number of years as Associate Dean of Students, where she worked to connect the Office of the Dean of Students with faculty and staff across campus to ensure that student needs and issues were being addressed, partnered with colleagues to support student mental health service transformation and assessed how to improve the student experience at the University of Alberta.Dr. Vallianatos has also previously served as Associate Chair (Undergraduate Programs) in the Department of Anthropology, during which time she worked to further develop the experiential learning component of the BA Honors program, while also incorporating community-service learning in many of her undergraduate and graduate courses. A past winner of the Faculty of Arts Teaching Excellence Award, she is committed to building connections between class materials and local contexts, while creating engaging learning environments. These commitments are echoed in her research program, where she works in teams that cross disciplinary boundaries and partner with community leaders and organizations to improve understandings of how cultural constructions of food and gender shape people's health practices. Her contributions were also recognized with a Faculty of Arts research excellence award.