Get to know Dr. Laurene Rehman, the new dean of the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management.
Dr. Laurene Rehman started her tenure as the dean of the Faculty of Kinesiology and Recreation Management in July 2026.
Rehman joined UM from Dalhousie University, where she served as the Director of the School of Health and Human Performance and Assistant Dean of Research (Students).
A lifelong believer in the benefits and importance of health and wellness in its many forms, Rehman is excited to join the faculty. A recreation and leisure expert, Rehman’s work has focused on advancing access and understanding for underrepresented groups. She has taught courses and supervised graduate research on leisure experiences for persons with disabilities, as well as Indigenous and immigrant communities.
We caught up with Rehman during her first two weeks on campus to get to know her a little better.
A: There's a ton of folks I have respect for as leaders. I look at folks in different areas to give different perspectives. So, in terms of right now in this academic setting, the last dean that I worked under, Brenda Merritt, was very inspirational. She prompted and probed us to be reflective, think about what we were doing and set goals for ourselves.
A: Being able to teach folks how to juggle! For motor control and learning class at UBC we were all supposed to try to learn how to juggle and to understand the learning process. I never [actually] learned how to juggle, but I became really good at teaching other people the process of how to do it.
A: As a young adult I loved The X-Files. We actually got to see them filming it while I was a student at the University of British Columbia. We had a study group that met in a mall after hours, and one night we left and all of a sudden there were these big bright lights blinding us. We didn’t know what was going on, but we found out they were filming an X-Files episode right there!
A: I have two fur babies. A 12-year-old cat, who we didn't want to move across the country so she's living with my two sons, and they get to have responsibility of looking after her. And my other is Nisha. She is a five-year-old labahoula. It's a Labrador crossed with a Catahoula Leopard Dog.
A: We drove over 3,700 km to get here and camped the whole way along. Camping is actually one of the things I love doing most. I travelled with my partner Ken and our fur baby, Nisha. That was actually the whole reason why we camped across, so Nisha had a place to swim at every stop along the way.
A: I like a whole range of genres, but the last one was more of a mystery whodunit. The author is Charlie Donlea, and the book was Twenty Years Later. I enjoyed it because it took you through this mystery of who created this crime and who did it. It held me on right till the very end.
A: I think for me, recreation is the fact that people can engage in whatever they want in their spare time. And so that's always the passion for me, trying to find what it is that people want to do and how to overcome any barriers or challenges that they may face to doing so.
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Dr. Jacquie Ripat assumed role of dean on July 1, 2026.
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