Chair of Senate
Dr. Spiteri is a professor in the School of Information Management and Chair of Senate. Dr. Spiteri has been a member of the Senate since 2015 and has served in a variety of positions, including membership on the Senate Planning and Governance Committee and the Senate Nominating Committee, and has chaired a number of Senate awards committees
Dr. Spiteri completed a BA and MA in Canadian history at York University, minoring in French studies, as well as courses in Italian and German. Following her studies at York, Dr. Spiteri completed a Bachelor of Education at the University of Toronto, where she specialized in history and French. Dr. Spiteri was a high-school teacher in Ontario, where she taught French and history across grades 9-12. During this time, Dr. Spiteri developed a love of information management and, in particular, classification systems and decided to pursue these interests via further studies. Dr. Spiteri completed a Master of Library and Information Science at Western University, and a PhD in Information Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Spiteri was actively involved in student life during her studies and served as president of the doctoral student association at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Spiteri teaches in the areas of knowledge management, metadata, and records and information management. Her research interests focus on creating metadata and social tagging systems that reflect the needs, perspectives, and languages of the end user, and exploring how data can be linked across the semantic web. More recently, her research marries her personal commitment to environmental sustainability by examining the information needs of zero waste lifestyle practitioners. Dr. Spiteri has co-authored two books related to linked data and social tagging, has over 65 peer-reviewed publications, and has delivered close to a hundred invited presentations in academic and professional venues.
Dr. Spiteri is a member of several scholarly and professional associations, including the Association for Information Science & Technology (where she serves on the Governance Committee), the Association for Library and Information Science Education (where she serves on the Governance Committee, and has also served as the President and Past President), ARMA International, and The Association for Intelligent Information Management.
In her personal life, Dr. Spiteri has been involved in choral singing since childhood. She embraces ethical veganism, zero-waste living, slow food and fashion, and minimalism. She is an avid cinephile, with a particular love of films of the silent era – especially German Expressionism – and Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s.
Senate vice-chair, academic programs
Dr. Blustein's academic appointment is as an associate professor in both the Faculty of Computer Science and School of Information Management. Dr. Blustein was active in university governance throughout their student years. At Dalhousie they have long represented Computer Science in Senate. Before being elected to Senate Dr. Blustein was a member of the Steering Committee of Dal Allies.
Dr. Blustein earned a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Western Ontario studying at the intersection of information retrieval and human-computer interfaces. Dr Blustein's multifaceted research shares the common purpose of helping people to find and use information. Drawing inspiration from Doug Engelbart's vision of the power of computing, most of that research is conducted under the mantle of the Hypertext Augmenting Intelligent Knowledge Use (HAIKU) research group.
Dr. Blustein is especially passionate about the need to constantly improve efforts towards the goals of equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization. As a Senate officer, Dr. Blustein also focuses on good governance: transparency, clarity, and engagement in the aid of excellence.
Senate vice-chair, student affairs
Dr. Pacurar joined Dalhousie University in 2005 and is an associate professor in the Rowe School of Business, Faculty of Management. She has also served as the school's research co-lead and coordinator of the finance department. Dr. Pacurar has been an active member of the Senate since 2015, contributing among others on the Senate Academic Programs and Research Committee.
Dr. Pacurar completed her bachelor's in economics degree at the Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania, with a major in International Business and Economics. She received an MBA from the University of Nantes and a Ph.D. in Finance from HEC Montréal.
An award-winning instructor and researcher, Dr. Pacurar considers an institution of higher learning to be central to the collective sense of purpose that defines what our society will become—ethical, compassionate, accepting or geared towards exclusion, greed, and indifference. She teaches corporate finance, risk management for financial institutions, and Financial Technologies (FinTech) courses in the regular and the executive education programs. She has also taught at HEC Montréal, Saint Mary's University and ESFAM (AUF). She is a past winner of the A. Gordon Archibald Teaching Excellence Award, the Faculty of Management Teaching Excellence Award, and the Mercure Award for the best doctoral thesis at HEC Montréal. Dr. Pacurar has been a member of the SSHRC Insight Grant national adjudication committee for business and management for three years. She was co-chair of the 2017 Northern Finance Association (NFA) Annual Conference and was elected President of the NFA (2017-2018).
Dr. Pacurar is most passionate about fairness and justice, and she is an advocate for equal opportunities for everyone. Although she does not consider herself an activist, she has never shied away from professing an uncompromising reverence for human and civil rights. As someone who has lived in a system based on dispossession, censorship, limitation of privacy and human rights, Dr. Pacurar has acquired a genuine appreciation of a free society in which individual emancipation and freedom constitute the very foundation of the value system. She is also cognizant of the many issues that can exist in a democratic country, such as systemic racism, xenophobia, or sexism. This is one of the main reasons why, more recently, her interest in factors leading to inequalities has increased significantly.
Community-minded, Dr. Pacurar also devotes time and resources to volunteering and helping kids in need abroad, not-for-profit organizations, and her parish.