University Executive Vice-President and CFO Dr. Leonidas Tzonis has been named an honorary professor at the Warsaw University of Business. He received the title during a special ceremony at the university on April 29th.

Dr. Tzonis was in Warsaw as part of a contingent of university officials who had been invited by the Polish Parliament and MP Daniel Milewski in the context of furthering international educational relations. Among the other members of the delegation was the rector of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Professor Nikos Papaioannou.

During their stay in Warsaw, the delegation was received by the Polish Minister of Education and Science Mr. Przemysław Czarnek and met with the rector of the University of Warsaw, Alojzy Nowak and parliamentary officials.

Image: Dr. Leonidas Tzonis named honorary professor at Warsaw University of Business

Two recent international graduates of the MBA program have been sponsored by their employer for the United States H-1B lottery in March 2022. The two alumni, Syed Imthiyas and Naveed Mohammed Khan, both of whom came to the University's Nashua campus with a promising background in information technology, were sponsored by the Houston-based firm CloudEnd Platform. They will be working as DevOps engineers on cloud-based platform solutions.

University President Leonidas Koskos has announced plans to establish a Center for Teaching Excellence to foster faculty development at the Athens and Nashua campuses. In an email sent to faculty last Wednesday (November 17), President Koskos stressed the pivotal role that effective teaching and technology together plan in the University’s ability to serve its mission. The creation of the Center, he added, will also allow the University to network with similar bodies at other colleges and universities and benefit from shared knowledge and opportunities for collaboration.

The Center will offer in-house seminars on topics such as attending to the learning needs of different student groups, promoting student creativity, and facilitating active learning across modalities, such as online synchronous classes or hybrid teaching. It will also host workshops and presentations from education experts. In addition, plans foresee a mentoring program for young faculty who are beginning their teaching careers.

Responsibility for implementing the project will be shared by University Provost Dr. Themis Kaniklidou, and the Dean for Digital Learning and Educational Innovation, Dr. Dimitris Tolias.

The creation of the Center is the latest in a series of major investments in educational infrastructure at the University. It follows upon a major upgrade of the institution’s eLearning platform, Blackboard, the creation of a high-speed wireless network on campus, and the refitting of classrooms in the Massalias 22 buildings as smart hybrid classrooms that can seamlessly accommodate the simultaneous teaching of onsite and online students. The Center also has precedents in the University’s practice of supporting faculty development through continuing education. Dr. Tolias himself just completed a University-funded 8-week online Higher Education Teaching Certificate Program offered by the Harvard University Derek Bok Center for Teaching & Learning.

As a prelude to the operations of the new Center for Teaching Excellence, a series of faculty training workshops will be offered starting this December to support faculty in their teaching duties and to familiarize them with the state-of-the-art infrastructure of our hybrid classes.

Image: Dr. Themis Kaniklidou, Provost, and Dr. Dimitris Tolias, Dean for Digital Learning and Educational Innovation

Hellenic American University is pleased to announce that the Advanced Level Certificate in English (ALCE™) has been revised, with the first administration of the revised examination taking place in January 2022.

The revisions of the ALCE™ are designed to reflect current methodology and practice in English language testing and the range of items included in the examination has been broadened so that it tests language competency at both C1 level and C2 level.

The ALCE™ continues to test communicative competence in all four skills: reading, writing, listening, and speaking, as well as tasks which test grammatical resources. However, there is now no separate vocabulary section, as vocabulary resources are tested through all tasks in all sections. As a result, the Grammar, Vocabulary, and Reading (GVR) section has been renamed the Reading and Use of Language (RUL) section.

All items in the Listening section and the Reading and Use of Language (RUL) section continue to be in multiple-choice format, but the number of items in the test has been reduced to provide a more efficient instrument to assess language competency, with 30 items in the Listening section and 50 items in the Reading and Use of Language section. In the RUL section, the single-sentence grammar and vocabulary items of the previous format have been replaced by items which provide candidates with more real-life context and language.

The Writing and Speaking sections remain similar to the previous format, except that more time is given for the Writing section, and the Speaking section now has only three tasks instead of four.

Candidates who obtain a scaled score of 55 or more out of 100 in the examination overall receive a Certificate at C1 level, while high-scoring candidates who achieve a scaled score of 74 or more out of 100 are awarded a Certificate at C2 level.

A detailed description of the revised ALCE™ will be made available shortly, together with a sample test.

The Hellenic American Union and Hellenic American University are proud to announce the upcoming visit of the legendary Hollywood film producer Sid Ganis, and his wife Nancy Hult Ganis, to Greece on October 11-17, 2021.

Ganis’s visit coincides with a series of events and meetings that the two organizations have organized to explore the possibility of creating a Center for Film Studies at Hellenic American University. The project is an idea of University President Leonidas Koskos, who also serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Hellenic American Union. As Koskos notes, the Center would build on the initiatives the University has already taken in this direction, such as its innovative program in Film Scoring (part of the Bachelor of Music), and the specialization in Translation for the Creative Industries (an option in the M.A. in Translation).

During his time in Greece, Ganis will also visit the Jewish communities in Athens and Thessaloniki, as well as Ioannina, where his grandparents lived before emigrating to New York City in the early 1900s.

Ganis is one of the motion picture industry’s most celebrated and successful executives. His career includes leadership roles at several studios, including Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, Columbia Pictures, Seven Arts and Warner Bros. While at Lucasfilm, he served as Senior Vice President and was responsible for marketing The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi and the first two installments of the Indiana Jones trilogy.

In 1986, Ganis joined Paramount Pictures and eventually became president of the Motion Picture Group, where he helped launch Top Gun and Fatal Attraction. As president, he oversaw the development and production of the worldwide hits Ghost and Forrest Gump, which would go on to become one of Paramount's biggest hits—both financially and critically—of all time.

After leaving Paramount in 1990, Ganis became president of marketing and distribution at Columbia Pictures. He also served on the boards of directors of numerous companies, including Marvel Entertainment for a decade, as well as several film festivals and film-related institutions. In 1996, he stepped down to produce films via his independent production company, Out of the Blue Entertainment.

Ganis also served as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (organizers of the Academy Awards) for four consecutive terms. Recently he appointed a lifetime trustee on the board of the Academy’s Museum, which opens this September.

Hellenic American University President Leonidas Phoebus Koskos announced last Thursday the appointment of Dr. Themis P. Kaniklidou as Provost, effective July 1, 2021. Kaniklidou will replace Interim Provost Dr. Christine Niakaris, who will be retiring at the end of June after many years of service to the University.

Kaniklidou, who has served as Associate Provost and Director of General Education since January 2020, joined the University as a lecturer in 2008 and was appointed Assistant (2012) and then Associate Professor (2017) in Translation and Communication Studies. While continuing her teaching and her research interests in discourse analysis and communication, she held several key administrative positions at the University. For the last decade, she has been Program Director of the M.A. in Translation and Associate Director of the Ph.D. program in Language and Communication and has served as Chair of the Institutional Review Board and of the Academic Committee.

In addition to her broad experience in academic administration, Kaniklidou brings to the position first-hand knowledge of higher education in the United States. For several years Kaniklidou was visiting and part-time (2016-2017) lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and visiting scholar at Rollins College (Florida). She also chaired the standard on educational effectiveness and student success in preparation for the University’s 10-year reaccreditation by the New England Commission of Higher Education in 2017.

In his letter to the University community announcing the appointment, President Koskos noted that “Dr. Kaniklidou has proven herself to be a highly respected academic leader whose support and loyalty to all constituencies of the Institution have been evident in her everyday activities.” He expressed his confidence that in her new role as member of the University’s Executive Administration she would contribute to the institution’s growth and help “achieve its goal of being a leader and innovator in higher education.”

In describing her vision of higher education today, Kaniklidou speaks of the need for “a student-focused education of creativity, with opportunities for innovation and self-actualization” and underscored the importance of “equipping students with relevant, expert knowledge but also helping them cultivate ethical values and critical reasoning skills that will never grow old.” Among her priorities for the coming academic year are faculty development, curricular planning, and the institutional self-assessment that the University will conduct for the fifth-year Interim Report it submits to its accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education.

Read President Koskos’s announcement of Dr. Kaniklidou’s appointment.

Hellenic American University bids farewell to Dr. Christine Niakaris, Interim Provost and Professor in Applied Linguistics, who enters retirement at the end of June 2021 after many years of service to the institution. President Leonidas Phoebus Koskos announced Niakaris’s retirement in a letter to the University community on June 24th, in which he praised her commitment to student learning and faculty development, adding that “she laid the groundwork for Hellenic American University to solidify its educational footprint.”

Niakaris has been part of the University since its founding in 2004 while still Director of the Center for Applied Linguistics and Language Studies at Hellenic American Union. She played a key role in the design and launch of the M.A. in Applied Linguistics program, one of the first degree programs the University offered, and later served as its Director after joining the faculty in 2011. During her tenure as Director she spearheaded the redesign of the program to a fully online delivery mode. Since January 2020 she had been leading the University’s academic affairs as Provost.

A passionate advocate of in-service training, Niakaris has been committed to raising the professional standards of English-language teaching in Greece through her long career—and not only through her classes at the University. Many in the English-language teaching community came to know her through the popular EFL course books she authored and the countless training seminars she led for public- and private-sector teachers.

Image: Dr. Christine Niakaris, University President Leonidas Phoebus Koskos, and newly appointed Provost, Dr. Themis Kaniklidou. Photo by James M. Lane.

Hellenic American University is excited to partner with SAS Institute, a worldwide leader in business intelligence and advanced analytics in an innovative training project that aims to enhance students’ skills in areas such as big data, machine learning and predictive analytics.

Through this joint venture, SAS will share with University faculty and students modern teaching resources and learning materials and will provide them with free access to the SAS Academic Hub web platform and other relevant software.

The instructional content made available through the partnership has been incorporated into three new graduate-level University courses under the guidance of the Directors of the University’s Informatics and Business programs—Drs. Panagiotis Kalozoumis and Stavros Sindakis, respectively. The new courses are Text Analytics and Machine Learning, which has been added to the M.Sc. in Informatics program; Forecasting, a new MBA course; and Visual Analytics, an interdisciplinary course addressed to both MSI and MBA students—all areas of expertise in growing demand. The new courses will be offered starting Spring 2022.

As Kalozoumis points out, the courses offer realistic hands-on experience in business analytics. He says that “incorporating SAS courses in our MSI program will have a very positive effect on the professional development and career choices of our students as well as on the reputation of the program itself.” Part of the added value are the clear pathways that SAS has to certifications and badges, which he calls “important, additional micro-credentials that will enrich the CVs of our students.”

The 2022 Spring launch date gives faculty ample time to become acquainted with the SAS learning platform and instructional materials through the AI Minds Academy, a recent joint initiative between SAS Institute and the Hellenic Federation of Enterprises (SEV), Greece’s largest business network, whose members include 400 of the largest corporations in Greece. The AI Minds Academy seeks to accelerate the digital transformation of the Greek business ecosystem by educating students in the latest AI and data science technologies and by linking them with high-caliber job market networks.

The partnership idea grew out of discussions between Dr. Damian Giannakis, Associate Professor in the HAUNIV Business Programs, and Yiannis Papatsiros an HAUNIV alumnus, PMBA ’13 valedictorian and SAS’s Regional Lead for Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria. The concept was further developed with input from Elpida Kallia SAS’s Regional Go to Market Head.

Students, faculty, and staff members from the Athens and Nashua campuses came together on June 2nd to celebrate student research and excellence at the Annual Student Achievement Day. The umbrella event, now in its 10th year, includes the Annual Student Conference and the President’s Award Ceremony.

The first part, which is organized by the Research Institute, serves as a forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their research. This year’s program featured four undergraduate and six graduate presentations (program attached).

At the end of the session, the Research Committee announced the awards for the best presentations. Eleni Plemmenou, Sasa Rajicic, Ioanna Katsianaki and George Kassimis, all students in the B.S. in Psychology program, received the undergraduate award for their paper “The Psycho-Social Effect of House Tagging on Residents and Neighborhood Health & Safety Risks of Sign Tagging”. Eleni Kalpia Ilia (MAAL '19) received the graduate award for her research on “Designing and Using an Intercultural Awareness & Sensitivity Checklist to Evaluate Selected Greek EFL Textbooks”.

In the second part, the University celebrated the 2020 and 2021 award recipients for the Newman Civic Fellowship, the NH Campus Compact Presidents’ Awards for Leadership, Good Steward, and Community Partner, and the President’s Awards for Academic Achievement.

New Hampshire colleges and universities celebrated the recipients of the 2021 Campus Compact NH Presidents’ Awards at an online ceremony on April 14, 2021. Among this year’s recipients were Hellenic American University’s honorees for Leadership, Eleni Plemmenou (BSPsy ’22) and Good Steward Award, Miriam Siwale (BSBA ’12, MBA ‘15), and the humanitarian organization FAROS, which received the Presidents’ Community Partner award.

Campus Compact for New Hampshire (CCNH) is a consortium of New Hampshire college and university presidents dedicated to civic education and engagement. The annual Presidents’ Awards are just one of a diverse range of initiatives that CCNH and its member institutions, Hellenic American University included, pursue in promoting civic engagement and community service on campus. CCNH’s activities include student leadership training to advocacy and legislative outreach.

Eleni Plemmenou, the recipient of the Presidents’ Leadership Award, is president of the Hellenic American University Marketing Club and co-president of the Art Club, while also part of the editorial team running the Titan Chronicles newsletter. In 2019, she launched the Business Talks series, creating a mentoring network between HAU students and successful businesspeople. In 2020, she helped strengthen the social connection between the Athens and Nashua campuses through club events and in 2021, help introduce the “Boroume” organization to HAU and the Politis Civic Engagement Program.

University Registrar Miriam Siwale has been at Hellenic American University since 2006. She recently worked with Dr. Sofia Protopapa, Director of the Career Development Office on the EU-funded project Advancing Migrant Women and helped revamp the training material for a younger target audience. Since then, Miriam was able to work with youngsters from her church. Her goal is to be able to work with any youngster that might feel stuck and might need a gentle nudge to move forward.

Faros is a Christian humanitarian organization that helps unaccompanied children and refugee youth find safety, discover their worth, and build a future perspective. Believing that education is key to the integration of unaccompanied minors, Faros partnered with the Hellenic American Union and the Hellenic American College in March 2020 in order to give Faros’ youth access to higher education. The beneficiaries have free access to educational material, free registration for all English language proficiency tests administered by the Hellenic American Union, and free-of-charge tuition for classes leading to a General Education Degree (GED) through Hellenic American College/Hellenic American University.

Image: 2021 Campus Compact NH Presidents’ Awards