Heather L. Servaty-Seib

Dr. Servaty-Seib is the senior associate vice provost for teaching and learning at Purdue University. She is a professor of Counseling Psychology in the College of Education with specialization in the field of thanatology (i.e., the study of death and dying) including late adolescent/young adults grief, suicidal ideation, and social support offered to the bereaved. She co-edited Assisting Bereaved College Students, a higher education resource, and We Get It, a book of narratives by grieving college students. Her scholarship has supported the development of college student grief absence policies at Purdue and other U.S. institutions. Dr. Servaty-Seib and her grief and loss research team developed the Perceived Impact of Life Event Scale, a measure that uses the gain/loss framework (i.e., all life events involve both gains and losses) to assess the multidimensional impact of single life events. Her engaged research has been supported by funding from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Lumina Foundation, and the John W. Anderson Foundation. Dr. Servaty-Seib was selected to serve as the lead editor of the most recent edition of the Handbook of Thanatology (2021).

As a teacher, Dr. Servaty-Seib has been active in service-learning as a powerful form of pedagogy receiving department, college, university (i.e., service-learning fellow), and state awards (i.e., Indiana Campus Compact—now Community-Engaged Alliance). She is also a recipient of Association for Death Education and Counseling-Death Educator of the Year award. With counseling and development colleagues, she coordinated the development of the Certificate in Collaborative Leadership, open to all Purdue undergraduates. To become tomorrow’s leaders, students need to be trained in the interpersonal aspects of leadership. The Certificate program uses highly experiential training to take students beyond management skills to team-building, empowerment of others, and identifying and capitalizing on human resources to reach goals. Dr. Servaty-Seib served two terms on the University Senate and was pivotal in the establishment of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion standing committee.

In her current role as senior associate vice provost of teaching and learning, Dr. Servaty-Seib works most directly with the teaching and learning units focused on student success, academic advising, exploratory studies (i.e., students exploring their best fit major), summer and winter sessions, academic and student success technology platforms, and Purdue’s relationship with the Purdue Polytechnic High Schools. She is also engaged in efforts to expand effective use of data to inform teaching and learning practices and is a primary facilitator of the relationship between teaching and learning and Purdue for Life.

She received her Ph.D. and Master’s degree in counseling psychology from the University of North Texas and completed her undergraduate studies at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN.