Allen fills new AAVMC accreditation staff position
Dr. Sheila W. Allen, dean of the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine, has been appointed senior accreditation adviser for the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges. In her new position, Dr. Allen will work with Dr. Karen Martens Brandt, director of the AVMA Education and Research Division, to support the AVMA Council on Education, which monitors compliance with accreditation standards for 49 veterinary colleges across the world.
The AVMA and AAVMC began sharing some of the costs of participation and staff support for the council in 2013. The AAVMC now pays for the costs of the COE members selected by the AAVMC COE Selection Committee and provides part-time staff support for the COE. The AVMA still largely funds the entity and contributes about 2.8 full-time-equivalent staff to the council; Dr. Allen will provide part-time assistance.
Dr. Allen has led the UGA veterinary college for 11 years; she will step down Dec. 1 to begin in her new position at the AAVMC, according to an Aug. 5 AAVMC press release.
She has held several national leadership roles during her tenure as dean. Not only was she a member of the COE but also of the AAVMC board of directors and the committee to assess veterinary workforce needs with the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Allen (Cornell ’81) completed a small animal internship and small animal surgical residency as well as earned her master’s in veterinary clinical pathology at Georgia before joining the veterinary faculty there in 1986. She is a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Surgeons.
Dr. Allen was appointed associate dean for academic affairs in 1997. Under Dr. Allen’s leadership, Georgia’s veterinary college revised the veterinary curriculum and modified admissions procedures to allow consideration of multiple criteria in the admissions process. Dr. Allen was appointed dean in 2005.
Highlights from her tenure as dean include doubling the applicant pool size for the DVM-degree program to 1,160 applications for 114 positions, increasing minority representation in the veterinary student body, increasing the veterinary college’s research enterprise from $8 million a year to $24 million a year in sponsored awards, and overseeing fundraising for and construction of the new Veterinary Medical Center, which opened in 2015.
A national search for the college’s next dean was launched in September.
Related JAVMA content:
Learning to listen (March 15, 2015)
Major changes the COE has made in the past few years (March 15, 2015)