Jennifer Griffin Schaeffer

Under Jennifer Griffin Schaeffer's leadership, in November 2018 Athabasca University became the first Canadian university to officially collaborate with Amazon Web Services to provide cloud infrastructure, accredited cloud education programs, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools for AU researchers’ innovation, and comprehensive cloud training for all technical and non-technical AU team members and management.

Schaeffer is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States has over 15 years of executive management experience and over 20 years of digital strategy and information and communication technology expertise. Most recently, Schaeffer served as the associate vice-president of university digital strategy in university relations at the University of Alberta for seven years. While there she co-founded Onlea Corporation, a not-for-profit focused on producing Massive Online Open Courses (MOOC) and engaging interactive learning experiences for academia, government, and industry. Before joining the post-secondary sector in 2010, Schaeffer spent over a decade leading product development, research and development (R&D), and customer acquisition strategies in institutional securities and retail banking in financial services firms headquartered in the USA and Canada. Also in the mid-90s, she founded and was executive editor of one of the first online and virtual news media start-ups, NewsTrolls, Inc.

Schaeffer holds a master of music degree from Yale University and a bachelor of music from Indiana University. A self-taught coder from age 11, she continues to be a lifelong learner in leadership, entrepreneurship, and IT professional development programs. In May 2019, as J.G. Schaeffer, she published her first book of speculative literary fiction, The Architects of Vascularization: Even the Losers. Married to artificial intelligence researcher, Dr. Jonathan Schaeffer, she and her husband live in Edmonton, Alberta, and enjoy nature hikes, antiquing, and travel adventures with their children.