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Deborah Canter


Canter, Deborah
Faculty Photo
Contact Information:
Email: canter@ksu.edu
Office: 785-473-7135
Home University:

Kansas State University
Home address:
4004 Lindsey Drive
Manhattan, KS 66502

University Profile

Program involvement
Dietetics & Nutrition Master's Degree - Instructor

Biography

Deborah D. Canter is professor emeritus who spent her 38-year career in the Department of Hospitality Management and Dietetics at Kansas State University. During her time at KSU, she served as head and graduate program director as well as director of both the coordinated program in dietetics and the didactic program in dietetics.

Besides her administrative duties, she taught both undergraduate and graduate courses and conducted research with masters degree and doctoral students.

In the mid-1990s, working with a $200,000 grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education, Canter and her KSU colleagues re-engineered the complete dietetics curriculum to be offered online, one of the first such projects in the country. The program continues today as the largest undergraduate distance education program in dietetics in the country. She also provided leadership for the development of the online master’s degree in dietetics with the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance, bringing together faculty from eight universities.

Canter was recognized in 1991 as the Professor of the Year for Kansas by the Carnegie Foundation’s Council for the Advancement and Support for Education. In 1997, she received the American Dietetic Association Foundation Award for Excellence in Practice in Dietetics Education. In 2000, she was named the William Evans Fellow by the Department of Nutrition at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Also in 2002, she was awarded the Medallion Award from the ADA for her leadership and contributions to the association and the dietetics profession. In 2012, she was honored as the 50th Lenna Frances Cooper Memorial Lecturer by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

She has served in numerous capacities within the ADA, which is now the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, including national secretary for the dietetic educators of practitioners practice group and four years on the ADA board of directors as chair-elect and chair, council on education and as two-time chairman of the commission on dietetic registration. She served nine years representing Kansas in the ADA house of delegates. She was chair of the national nominating committee and also served as chairman of the foodservice systems management education council.

Canter was the editor of The School Food Service Research Review from 1992 –1998. She has been a member of the advisory board of the National Food Service Management Institute and an appointed member of the Phase 2 future dietetics practice and education task force of the ADA, a group charged with making recommendations for sweeping changes in dietetics education.

Canter has worked with numerous graduate students through the years, publishing articles in the areas of human resources issues in foodservice management and hospitality organizations and multi-department management in dietetics. She is a co-author of an introductory text widely used in dietetics programs across the country, and she has authored two chapters in textbooks on the history of dietetics education.

Education

Ph.D. in Food Systems Administration, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1977
M.S. in Food Systems Administration, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 1974
B.S. in Home Economics Education, University of Tennessee at Martin, 1972