Our team

Discover the teams that contribute to our success: the Office Team, the Management Board, and the General Council.

Our office team

Sara Pittarello -
Managing Director

I serve as UNICollaboration’s Managing Director, taking care of controlling and directing operations within the organisation. I make sure that UNICollaboration policies are implemented effectively and I represent the organisation at public events.

Lorenza Bacino - Communications

I’m the Communications Officer for the organisation and my role entails keeping the website
updated with regular blog posts in which I interview Virtual Exchange practitioners and
participants about their research and experience in the field.

Mia Protic -
Marketing assistant

I’m Mia Protic from Serbia, and I’m honoured to join UNICollaboration as Marketing Assistant. I work closely with the Communications Officer, Managing Director, and Webmaster to deliver engaging marketing and promotional activities.

Zakaria Zohrat –
Office and web master

I work as a consultant for Axyom in Brussels, and with UNICollaboration, one of our partners, I manage the website and administration, working closely with the Communications Officer, the IT specialist, the Marketing Assistant and the Managing Director.

Our management board

Shannon Sauro -
President and Treasurer

Shannon Sauro (PhD), is the current President of UNICollaboration and a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (USA) in the programme for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). She speaks English, German and Swedish.

Sarah Guth -
Vice President

I am honoured to be one of the founding members of UNICollaboration and the current Vice
President.

Since we established the organisation our activities have grown quickly and greatly
from the Journal of Virtual Exchange to our involvement in several funded projects from
Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange to several smaller projects that are ongoing.

Sara Pittarello–
Managing Director and Project Manager

Sara Pittarello currently serves as UNICollaboration’s Managing Director and Project Manager.
She recently contributed to Outreach and Monitoring & Evaluation activities in the framework of Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (E+VE) for UNICollaboration.

She speaks Italian, English, German and Portuguese.

Francesca Helm -
Researcher Coordinator

Francesca Helm (PhD) is Associate Professor of English at the Department of Political Science,
Law and International Studies at the University of Padua.

She is research officer for UNICollaboration.

Marco Cappellini -
Secretary

Marco Cappellini is a professor of Language Sciences at the Université Lyon 1 Claude Bernard, at the Institut National Supérieur du Professorat et de l’Éducation (INSPÉ), and a member of the Laboratoire Interactions, Corpus, Apprentissages, Représentations (ICAR) UMR 5191 CNRS

Lorenza Bacino –
Communications and Content

Lorenza Bacino has been part of the UNICollaboration team since the Erasmus Plus Virtual Exchange project funded by the European Commission between 2018 to the end of 2020 and
currently acts as the Communications Coordinator.

She speaks English, Italian and French and very bad Dutch!

Our General Council

Shannon Sauro

I first became involved in virtual exchange 20 years ago as a doctoral student. Since then, I have become a practitioner, researcher and trainer of virtual exchange both in the United States and Sweden.

Sarah Guth

I am honored to be one of the founding members of UNICollaboration and the current president. Since we established the organisation our activities have grown quickly and greatly from the Journal of Virtual Exchange to our involvement in several funded projects from Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange to several smaller projects that we are currently participating in.

Mirjam Hauck

I am a founder member of UNICollaboration and have served – until 2018 – as the organisation’s first training officer. I still provide training in VE Project Design for UNICollaboration on a regular basis.

Post-pandemic, VE – as has been pointed out at the British Council’s GOING GLOBAL 2021 conference – will “continue to play a vital role in expanding equitable access to the many global competencies and 21st century skills critical to success within the global economy”.

Carolin Fuchs

I became a member of UNICollaboration’s Executive Board in the role of First Publications Officer in 2018 (until 2022) and have served as co-editor-in-chief of the organization’s Journal of Virtual Exchange (JVE) since then. It has been rewarding and inspiring to see an increase in diverse, inclusive, and interdisciplinary submissions from previously underrepresented contexts.

Alexandra Reynolds

Alexandra Reynolds is associate professor of English and Linguistics at Bordeaux University, France. She is in charge of Internationalisation at Home initiatives, including international track programmes, virtual exchanges and blended mobilities.
Her research focuses on the internationalisation processes of French Higher education.

Müge Satar

Dr. Müge Satar is Director for Global at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK. She is a Senior Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy.

In the department of Applied Linguistics, she supervises PhD students and teaches masters level courses, such as technology-enhanced language learning, materials design, and online language teaching, which incorporate a virtual exchange element.

Marco Cappellini

Telecollaboration and virtual exchange have been my main interest for pedagogical practice and research since 2009. I had a first contact with the UNICollaboration team in London in 2011, when it was still named after the Intent project, and ever since I greatly profited from the many initiatives, conferences, and the tools developed.

I was actively engaged in the activities of the association, with the organisation of the second research seminar in Aix-en-Provence in October 2018.

Francesca Helm

I’m a researcher at the University of Padua at the Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies and much of my research has focused on virtual exchange and, more recently, on critical approaches to internationalisation of higher education.

I was one of the founding members of UNICollaboration and I was second research officer for the organisation. I was involved with UNICollaboration in the monitoring and evaluation of the European Commission’s Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange project.

Lorenza Bacino

I joined UNICollaboration during the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (EVE) project in 2018. During EVE, I was responsible for managing our HEI VE projects and facilitating online synchronous sessions in English, French and Italian for those educators who had developed VE projects through our training. I was the main contact point for the teachers who came to us to discuss their projects and how we could support them.

I was also involved in the VE training during EVE – in French – both on the Introduction to Virtual Exchange training course and the Advanced (now known as VE Project Design). The EVE team supported and managed over 70 TEPs between 2018-2020 involving thousands of young people across Europe and the Southern Mediterranean.

Sake Jager

I have been involved since 2011 when the name UNICollaboration and its first website were established and a board member from 2016 to 2022. I have been a member of the GC since then.

My university (University of Groningen, Netherlands) is hosting and providing support for several communication channels used by UNICollaboration (e.g. website, listserver, email services, Journal of Virtual Exchange), which I helped to establish. My current collaboration with UNICollaboration is also through the Dutch VIS initiative (https://visinhetho.nl/), in which my university is one of the consortium partners.

Become a member

Join our organisation as an individual or institutional member to help us promote telecollaboration and virtual exchange practice and research. Help us promote further constructive policy development in this area.