Rate My Professor Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell

Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta and serves as College Dean and Vice Provost of the College of Natural and Applied Sciences. She received a B.Sc. Hons. (1993) and M.Sc. (1996) in Biology from the University of Regina and a Ph.D. in Zoology from Western University in 2001. She held an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the University of Alberta in 2019, she spent 16 years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as Director of Graduate Studies in Biology and Head of the Department of Biology.

At the University of Alberta, Kalcounis-Rueppell was Dean of Science from 2019 to 2021 and Interim Dean of the College of Natural and Applied Sciences from 2021 to 2023 before her current appointment. Her research focuses on the biology of acoustic communication in wild bats and mice, examining how ecological, physiological, and anthropogenic factors influence these behaviors in natural settings. She has led the Southeastern Bat Diversity Network and the North American Society for Bat Research. Her work has received funding from NSERC, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health, among other sources. She directs outreach through the program “Bats and Mice in Your Backyard” and serves on boards including the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute, and Telus World of Science Edmonton.