Assistant Director of the Spectrum of Care Initiative
Ext. 225 | hfedesco@aavmc.org
Dr. Heather N. Fedesco serves as the Assistant Director of the Spectrum of Care Initiative (SOCI) at AAVMC. She works with the Executive Director of the Spectrum of Care Initiative to plan the detailed steps required to create an educational model and implementation guidelines for instruction related to spectrum of care.
Prior to joining the AAVMC, Dr. Fedesco worked at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Teaching and Purdue University’s Center for Instructional Excellence. In these roles, she developed, facilitated, and evaluated educational professional development programming focused on helping faculty, graduate students, and postdocs acquire and refine effective instructional skills and strategies, and helping them plan or redesign their courses.
Dr. Fedesco also held grant-funded research positions at University of Georgia and Colorado College. Her research focuses on identifying how interpersonal relationships and instructional communication improve student motivation and academic outcomes. Specifically, her research aims to 1) understand how enhancing interpersonal communication within life science graduate mentoring relationships affects graduate students’ experiences and outcomes, and 2) identify, characterize, and promote forms of instructional communication that help improve student-instructor relationships and student motivation.
Dr. Fedesco earned a PhD and MA degree in Interpersonal Communication at Purdue University. As a graduate student at Purdue, she spent four years serving as Assistant Course Director of Fundamentals of Speech Communication, one of the nation’s largest undergraduate public speaking courses.
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