Provost & Vice-President, Academic

Dr. Gillian Balfour

Dr. Gillian Balfour is the Provost and Vice-President, Academic at Lakehead University, where she serves as the institution’s chief academic officer. Reporting to the President and Vice-Chancellor, she provides leadership in academic planning and operations, strategic academic initiatives.

Dr. Balfour brings extensive experience in academic leadership, policy development, and strategic planning in post-secondary institutions across Canada. She joined Lakehead in 2025 from Thompson Rivers University (TRU), where she served as Provost and Vice-President Academic. At TRU, she was the chief budget officer and academic leader, overseeing a unique mandate to deliver both on-campus and online learning for 30,000 students. She led the development of TRU’s first integrated resource allocation plan and launched TRU Bold, an academic strategy focused on research excellence, flexible delivery through open education, and enhanced recognition for unique programs focused on land based learning and community engaged research. 

Prior to her role at TRU, Dr. Balfour served as Vice-Principal and Academic Dean at King’s University College at Western University. There, she championed equity and inclusion in academic governance, oversaw a salary equity review, and implemented dedicated investment strategies for the Indigenization and decolonization of curriculum and hiring practices.

Dr. Balfour spent nearly two decades at Trent University, where she served as Associate Dean of Trent Online and the Centre for Teaching and Learning. As a professor in the Sociology department, she was a member of Canada’s Walls to Bridges collective, which delivers prison-based learning for incarcerated and non-incarcerated students. She also launched Trent’s first fully online degree in critical criminology. 

An accomplished academic, Dr. Balfour earned her PhD in sociology from the University of Manitoba. Her research focuses on socio-legal studies and feminist criminology, with particular emphasis on sentencing law reform and restorative justice as responses to the over-incarceration of Indigenous women.

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