A message to the campus community:

Welcome to fall term 2018.

We have six faculty members joining the Mount community this fall as Assistant Professors. We are very excited to have these colleagues with us. Our students, as well as faculty and staff, will benefit from their expertise, research, energy, and enthusiasm.

Below you will find brief biographies for each new faculty member. I encourage you to reach out and meet them. There will be longer stories about each of them this fall from Communications and Marketing.

Please join me in welcoming them to the Mount.

Best wishes,
Elizabeth

Elizabeth Church, PhD
Vice-President Academic and Provost

New faculty (2018/19)

Dr. Germaine Chan, Assistant Professor, Business (Accounting)
Germaine completed her Doctorate in Business Administration at Athabasca University in 2018. She also holds an MBA from McGill University, an undergraduate degree from the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University and a CA/CPA designation. Prior to joining the Mount on July 1, 2018, she worked at the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University in a number of roles: Lecturer, Director of Marketing, and for the last 12 years, as Director of Finance and Budgets. Dr. Chan’s research area is the use of performance information in the public sector, specifically in the Canadian higher education sector.

Prof. Paulette Cormier, Assistant Professor, Business and Tourism
Paulette is currently pursuing an MBA at Athabasca University and holds a Master of Arts in Education (Lifelong Learning) from the Mount, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Human Ecology and Certificate in Management Development for Women both from the Mount (the latter awarded in partnership with Saint Mary’s University). Paulette worked as a Lecturer and Senior Lab Instructor in Tourism and Hospitality Management at the Mount and taught labs in the Department of Applied Human Nutrition. She has experience in the areas of food service, hospitality, and fitness, and is an instructor for various management-level food safety courses. Paulette’s research interests include workplace learning in tourism and hospitality management and student engagement.

Dr. Amélie Lemieux, Assistant Professor, Education
Amélie holds a PhD in Literacies from McGill University and completed a post-doctoral fellowship with CRC Jennifer Rowsell at the Centre for Research in Multiliteracies, Brock University. Her research interests are visual and written literacies, maker education, arts and literacy education, and digital literacy practices. Author of a recent co-authored book published by Peter Lang NY, Amélie looks forward to working with students, staff, colleagues, and the community-at-large to prepare teachers for the demands of the teaching profession in the 21st Century and to conduct research on high school students’ digital literacy practices in Halifax schools.

Prof. Jeff McKinnon, Assistant Professor, Business (Accounting)
Jeff has been teaching at the Mount for the past ten years in both part-time and term positions. Born and raised in Nova Scotia, Jeff graduated from the Mount with a Bachelor of Business Administration in 2002. He continued his studies at Saint Mary’s University, completing an MBA in 2005 and obtaining his professional accounting designation the same year. Jeff is a CPA, CMA, and is actively engaged in the profession. His research focuses include Canada’s conversion to International Financial Reporting Standards, as well as private company capital structure.

Dr. Heidi Weigand, Assistant Professor, Business (Management)
Heidi joined the Mount on July 1, 2018. She completed her Executive MBA and PhD in Management at Saint Mary’s University, and her BA in Languages at Dalhousie University. Heidi’s research areas are leadership, governance and ethics, with a specific interest in examining global nonprofit management models to identify innovative and sustainable practices. In her PhD research, she developed and tested a new leadership construct ‘leader positivity,’ empirically distinct and positively correlated to a widely known and used leadership construct, transformational leadership, and the effects on innovation and burnout. In her master’s thesis, she developed a First Nation governance tool for the First Nation Centre for Governance, and explored the multitude of different governance models used in business, non-profit organizations, and the historical practices of the Mi’kmaq people. (Read more about Heidi here)

Dr. Doug Whitaker, Assistant Professor, Mathematics
Doug comes to the Mount from the University of Wisconsin-Stout. He earned his PhD in Statistics Education from the University of Florida in 2016. Doug’s primary research is on the development of high-quality research instruments, such as content assessments and surveys with a focus on validity evidence. During his doctoral work, he was a member of the Levels of Conceptual Understanding in Statistics (LOCUS) project team which developed statistics content assessments for students in grades 6 to 12; the LOCUS project received funding from the National Science Foundation. In his teaching, Doug aims to make statistics accessible and useful for all students.