Dr. Alessandra Sax, Assistant Professor and Director of the Hellenic American University’s Psychology programs and the Counseling Center, led a day-long workshop on trauma and the expressive arts at the Spring 2022 Learning Institute, organized by the European Branch of the American Counseling Association (EB-ACA). Sax spoke as a guest professor at the Institute, which was held for the first time this year in hybrid mode at Edinburgh, Scotland and online, May 13-14, 2022. In her workshop, Sax explored the ways in which the creative and expressive arts can be used in child play therapy (and with adolescents and adults) and their role as a means for self-expression and self-discovery.

EB-ACA is a partnership of counseling professionals who share a commitment to developing a deeper understanding of the counseling profession and fostering public confidence and trust in its practice. The Learning Institute is among the most important events the Association organizes during the year.

We are excited to announce the 63rd Annual European Branch of the American Counseling Association (EB-ACA) Conference, which will be held at the Athens campus of Hellenic American University on October 21st-22nd, 2022.

This year's conference theme is "Moving through together: Addressing a changing world." The Conference’s Scientific Committee welcomes proposals that address diverse issues in disciplines such as clinical mental health counseling, professional school counseling, career counseling, rehabilitation counseling, college counseling, higher education advising, and marriage, couples and family counseling. Preference will be given to proposals that reflect this year's conference theme, address international counseling issues, and tackle social justice and advocacy.

The conference is an excellent opportunity for professional development. Graduate students and faculty can submit proposals for up to two sessions. Undergraduate students can submit and present a poster.

Proposals should be submitted via this online form by July 6th, 2022.

If you have questions or comments, contact the Association at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

EB-ACA is continuing to monitor COVID-19 and will communicate any updates on the 2022 EB-ACA Conference.

Image: Poster of the 63rd EB-ACA Conference

A Call for Papers has been announced for the 1stTerra (in) Cognita International Conference, which Hellenic American University is organizing for November 10-13, 2022 in Athens, Greece. The theme for this year’s conference, which is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, U.S, is Dialogues between Greek Culture and Modern American Art.

The Conference will feature research on cross-cultural exchange between modern American art and aspects of Greek culture, such as myth, ancient tragedy, Byzantine art and architecture, and symbolism. In its Call for Papers, recently published on the Conference website, the Conference’s Scientific Committee is inviting researchers, artists, graduate and postgraduate to submit abstracts for papers and poster sessions as well as proposals for themed panels.

The deadline to submit an abstract is June 30th, 2022. The detailed Call for Papers and submission guidelines can be found on the official website.

Contact Information: For any questions, please contact the organizing committee at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Conference Website: https://terra.hauniv.edu/

Image: James M. Lane, Emersion 2021, video installation.

Eleni Plemmenou, a 4th-year student in the B.S. in Psychology program, has been chosen to take part in a special youth session of the 31st EURASHE Annual Conference in Brussels this May. She is one of the ten university students from applicants from across Europe that EURASHE, the EU-funded European Association of Institutions in Higher Education, selected to participate in the conference and whose travel and accommodation costs it will cover.

This year’s conference, which will be held on the campus of EPHEC in Brussels May 23-24, is titled “Next Generation PHE: Skills relevance, Inclusion, Digitalisation, Innovation”. It will focus on how professional higher education can help Europe “build back better” as it emerges from the COVID pandemic. The creation of the special session this year—the European Year of Youth—reflects EURASHE’s wish to “put students and young people at the centre of these discussions and co-create the future of higher education together.”

Seema Regmi, an MBA student at our Nashua campus who hails from Nepal, has been formally accepted for Lehigh University’s 2022 Iacocca Global Village program.

Global Village is an intensive virtual and on-site summer program that teaches university students and young professionals entrepreneurship and leadership skills while preparing them to thrive in a global community.

Seema starts her program mid-May virtually and then will attend the five-week on-campus residency at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania before returning to Nashua for her MBA studies, where she will complete the final five-week virtual segment.

Each year, about 60 – 90 university students and young professionals from roughly 40 countries are selected to attend the Global Village program. Given the diversity of the student body as well as learning experiences such as team consulting projects and design challenges, Seema and her fellow “global villagers” can also expect to develop their interdisciplinary teamwork and cross-cultural leadership skills. With an alumni body of over 2,300 leaders from 141 countries, the Global Village experience is also an exceptional networking opportunity for participants.

Image: Lehigh University Packard Lab by Chris Knight, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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.