Nipissing University announced the appointment of Kevin Wamsley as its new president and vice-chancellor. Dr. Wamsley currently serves as vice-president, academic, and provost of St. Francis Xavier University and will begin his new role at Nipissing on Aug. 1. He also served as St. FX’s interim president, and spend 18 years at Western University in a variety of roles, including professor, associate dean, acting dean and the director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies. Dr. Wamsley is recognized as one of the world’s leading Olympic Games experts and historians and has appeared in media publications and broadcasts nearly 1,600 times.
Heather Saunders will join Acadia University as its first dean of library and archives on July 15. Ms. Saunders is currently the University of Winnipeg’s copyright and scholarly communications librarian. Previously, she was director of the Ingalls Library at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which supported art history and museum studies graduate students and faculty at Case Western Reserve University. She also served as manager, digital resources and information services, at Nipissing University and the faculty art librarian at Purchase College, State University of New York.
Mourad Debbabi has been appointed dean of the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science at Concordia University. Dr. Debbabi, who is an expert in cybersecurity, cyberforensics and critical infrastructure protection, has been serving as interim dean since May 2020 and will begin a five-year term in the role on June 1. He joined Concordia in 2003 as a professor and has held a number of research chairs, including his current NSERC/Hydro-Quebec Thales Senior Industrial Research Chair in Smart Grid Security. Before coming to Concordia, Dr. Debbabi was an associate professor at Université Laval and a research associate at Stanford University in California.