FAUW is pleased to announce that Lori Curtis will serve as FAUW president for a two-year term beginning July 1. Lori is the chair of the Academic Freedom & Tenure Committee. We will announce the new AF&T chair soon.
Mario Ioannidis, currently an at-large director and member of the Executive Committee, will take the Engineering seat on the board for one year as of July 1.
Both were unopposed and therefore elected by acclamation after a two-week nomination period. This is not an unusual outcome for either the position of FAUW president or a short-term vacancy on the board, especially so soon after a normal election cycle.
Lori Curtis is a professor in the Department of Economics who came to Waterloo in 2005 after time in health care, the federal government, and at Dalhousie University. Her policy relevant research focuses on inequities in health and economic well-being, broadly defined.
About her interest in and commitment to working on behalf of FAUW members, Lori says:
"Since coming to UW, I have been a willing and active participant on departmental, faculty, and university level committees which allow faculty input on their working environment. In the last 12 years of working with FAUW, I have been a strong proponent for faculty on the Pension and Benefits Committee (P&B), the Faculty Relations Committee (FRC), the Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee (AF&T) and in policy development.
"I have been Chair of AF&T for the past three years. I worked diligently to secure the equitable treatment of all faculty members, to safeguard their academic freedom, and ensure that collegially developed UW policies are equitably adhered to within the university. I have assisted individual faculty members with the tenure and promotion process; during investigative processes; and with obtaining the benefits they deserve at work, on leave, and even into retirement. I have witnessed inequitable treatment of faculty that was not successfully remediated, whether because there were no relevant policies, administrative interpretation of policy differed substantially from FAUW/AF&T, or policies were outdated. In many cases, the faculty members were marginalized, precariously employed, newly appointed, and/or experiencing health issues.
"When issues are brought to AF&T, it is up to the individual faculty member—with the assistance of AF&T—to fight for their rights. I take all this experience and knowledge with me as I become President of FAUW and move to working on matters that affect faculty at large."
Learn more about Lori and the work of AF&T in our profile on the FAUW blog.
Mario Ioannidis has been associate chair for undergraduate studies in the Department of Chemical Engineering, director of the Nanotechnology Engineering Program, and Waterloo’s Academic Colleague to the Council of Ontario Universities. He’s served on Engineering’s Faculty Tenure & Promotion Committee, University Senate, the Senate Long Range Planning Committee, and the University Appointments Review Committee. He also co-chaired the 2020 Salary Anomaly Working Group.
About serving on the FAUW Board, Mario says: “For collegial governance to succeed, we need to dedicate some of our time to improving the policies and procedures that govern our work at the University. One way to do this is by helping our Faculty Association serve its members. I am grateful for the opportunity to do this as Director-at-Large during the past year.”
The other directors starting July 1 are Trevor Charles, Frankie Condon, Mary Hardy, Su-Yin Tan, and Vershawn Young.