For the last twenty-seven years, Nancy Janus has been a professor of human development at Eckerd College in Saint Petersburg. During that time she has taught Global Children’s Issues, Human Trafficking, Issues in Adoption, and Counseling. Folded into these courses have been travels with students to Viet Nam, Malaysia, Tanzania, Thailand and especially Cambodia. She also led spring break service trips throughout Central America.
She earned a doctorate in Counseling Psychology from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and also gained her license as a clinical psychologist. She taught French in high schools, earned a Masters in School Psychology, and taught at the Eastern Kentucky University. For twelve years she was a tenured Professor of School Psychology and Counseling at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. She is fluent in French, Spanish, and Tunisian Arabic, this last reflecting her three years in the Peace Corps in Tunisia.
She created a program in international adoption in Bolivia that ultimately facilitated the adoption of more than seventy infants. She and her husband also have three daughters adopted from Colombia .
Growing out of her Peace Corps experience, travel and international cultural exchange have been central to every academic effort she has undertaken. She is the author of Ethnicity in the lives of modern Malaysian youth, and West meets East: The current state of mental health services in Cambodia. Travel for Nancy has taken on a different dimension since a bicycle accident in 2012 left her in a wheelchair, Nonetheless, she has continued to travel with students internationally during Eckerd’s winter term and went around the world in Fall 2017 as a professor on Semester at Sea.
