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Halaevalu Fonongava'inga Ofahengaue Vakalahi, PhD, MSW, MEd
President and Chief Executive Officer
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Dr. Vakalahi is a Pacific Islander woman, born in Tonga and raised in Hawai’i. She is the President and CEO of the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE). Prior to joining CSWE, she was a Professor and Dean of the College of Health and Society, an interdisciplinary college, at Hawai’i Pacific University (HPU). Prior to HPU, she was a tenured full-Professor and Associate Dean of the School of Social Work at Morgan State University (Baltimore, MD); Associate Professor and MSW Program Director at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA); Lecturer and BSW Coordinator at San Francisco State University (San Francisco, CA); Assistant Professor and Department Chair at BYU-Hawai’i (La’ie, Hawai’i); and Assistant Professor at New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, NM). She earned a BS in Business Management from BYU-Hawai’i, MSW from University of Hawai’i-Manoa, and MEd and PhD in Social Work from University of Utah.Dr. Vakalahi has been privileged to serve in various professional organizations across disciplines and in communities in which she has lived and worked. Her areas of teaching include social policy, human behavior and the social work environment, and organizational leadership. Her two areas of research/scholarship are Pacific Islander culture/community and Women of Color in academia, in which she has contributed extensively to the existing literature through peer-reviewed articles, chapters, books, references, and other mediums. She is a proud alum of the CSWE Minority Fellowship Program, a Fulbright Senior Scholar, a Hartford Faculty Scholar, recipient of the CSWE Feminist Scholar award, and the Morgan State University Iva G Jones award. Among many things, Dr. Vakalahi is deeply committed to the futures and advancement of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, which, in essence, has been shaped by extraordinary people and places that have invested in her. For that, she is eternally grateful.