Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell

College Dean & Vice Provost of Natural and Applied Sciences

Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell is the college dean and vice provost of the University of Alberta’s College of Natural and Applied Sciences, which brings together the combined strength of the faculties of agricultural, life and environmental sciences, engineering, and science. It represents more than 625 faculty members and 17,000+ undergraduate and graduate students. 

Academic Career

As interim dean of the College of Natural and Applied Sciences from 2021-2023, Kalcounis Rueppell's collaborative approach has helped faculty and staff to successfully navigate an extraordinary amount of change. Working in partnership with college leadership and the council of deans, she has helped to consolidate academic and administrative processes at the college level, encouraging closer collaboration between units. In her previous role as dean of the Faculty of Science, Kalcounis Rueppell guided faculty and staff through a time of great change.

Prior to coming to the U of A, Kalcounis-Rueppell spent 16 years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was most recently head of the Department of Biology. 

Kalcounis-Rueppell received B.Sc.Hons (1993) and M.Sc (1996) degrees in Biology from the University of Regina, and a Ph.D. in Zoology from Western University (2001). She held an NSERC postdoctoral fellowship at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Research, Teaching and Community Engagement

Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell is an internationally recognized scientist whose research centers on the biology of acoustic communication in wild bats and mice, two biodiverse groups of mammals that communicate using ultrasound. Using innovative and integrative approaches in the field, she characterizes their communication behaviors and determines how ecological, physiological, and anthropogenic effects mediate those behaviors. She has been funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as other government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and industry. Through her outreach program “Bats and Mice in Your Backyard”, she communicates her science, which has also been featured in the popular press, radio and television, and children’s literature, to the public.

Kalcounis Rueppell is a director on numerous boards including the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI), and the Telus World of Science Edmonton.