Olenka Bilash

Olenka Bilash is a project Principal Investigator, is a Professor of Secondary Education at the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. Dr. Bilash also serves as Senior Advisor to the Ukrainian Language Education Centre, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS).  She was co-director of the Contemporary Ukraine Research Forum (CURF) project (2014) and developed a strong working relationship with partner universities.  For example, she now sits on the Advisory Council to the Ukrainian Resource and Development Centre at MacEwan University.  She also has a strong track record of co-publishing papers with graduate students and colleagues, for example, a paper about CURF’s rapid response research with co-director Dr. Roman Petryshyn (2014) and another with ULEC’s MLCS partner Dr. Alla Nedashkivska about community university scholarship of engagement (2014).   She is also is North American representative to Linguapax, a UNESCO-affiliated organization that examines and advocates for plurilingualism, multilingual policies and language use around the globe.  A former Associate Dean for the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research where she helped to launch the University of Alberta’s practices with international graduate students, Olenka has received numerous awards, including the prestigious 3M Teaching Fellowship as well as the Stephen Freeman Award for the best published paper in second language education, and been acknowledged by indigenous and local communities and her long-term work with Hokkaido, Japan.