Dr. Tara Ivanochko appointed Academic Director, UBC Sustainability Initiative
A message from Moura Quayle, Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President Academic Affairs, and David Shorthouse, Executive Director, Academic Initiatives
It gives us great pleasure to announce that Dr. Tara Ivanochko has been appointed the Academic Director, UBC Sustainability Initiative (USI), effective Oct. 13, 2020. The Academic Director sets strategic goals and priorities for the USI and is responsible for the renewal and development of a framework to provide vision, guidance, and oversight to the USI with a view to continuous improvements. Working in partnership with the USI Senior Director, Linda Nowlan, Tara will provide the USI with academic leadership, planning, implementation, and evaluation oversight.
Tara has worked as a Sustainability Fellow with the USI to forward sustainability education at UBC, as a steering committee member for the UBC Centre for Sustainable Food Systems, and as a member of the UBC Interdisciplinary Education Task Force. She has helped envision the UBC 20-year Sustainability Strategy, contributed to the development of the Faculty of Science sustainability course offerings and the Sustainable Food Systems minor. Currently Tara is collaborating with the Department of Geography to develop a climate change credential and with the Outer Space Institute to advocate for sustainable use of Space.
Tara joined UBC’s Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences as a faculty in the Educational Leadership steam in 2009, after completing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, reconstructing the environmental history of the Indian monsoon system using geochemical tracers in marine sediments.
As EOAS Associate Head Undergraduate Affairs, Tara has coordinated the recent EOAS transition to teaching online. She is also leading a three-year departmental curriculum initiative to embed open source computational tools into EOAS courses, which will contribute to the Data Science minor that is currently in development.
Since 2010 Tara has served as the Director of the Environmental Science undergraduate degree program, where she has redesigned the program curriculum, developed a collaborative community-engaged capstone course, where students work in partnership with local organizations on environmental projects that are relevant to the community, developed a strong relationship between Environmental Science and the Institute of Resources, Environmental and Sustainability, and added a new Sustainability Science option to the degree. During her directorship, student enrollment in Environmental Science has doubled and the program has been consistently recognized as one of the top 12 programs internationally.
Tara will bring outstanding experience and a new perspective to the USI as Academic Director. Please join us in welcoming her into this role.
We would also like to express our sincere appreciation to the search committee for their outstanding work during the appointment process.