​Elias Shakkour has been the Director of DePaul's Translator and Interpreter Corps (TIC) since September 2019. His trajectory in translation and interpreting (T&I) has taken him from two years of rigorous training in translation, consecutive interpreting, and simultaneous interpreting at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (MIIS) to four years of experience teaching and training undergraduate and graduate T&I students as a full-time instructor at the Center for Translation Studies (CTS) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), seven years of experience as a grader for the American Translators Association's (ATA) renowned translation certification program, and around five years of experience as a lexicographer and trainer for WordReference.com. Along the way, he has earned eight ATA certifications (in translation from English into Arabic and from Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish into English) and gained close to ten years of T&I experience in a number of language pairs and fields, including academic, educational, legal, marketing, social services, and technical.

Dr. Shakkour has native proficiency in English and Arabic; near-native proficiency in German; advanced proficiency in Spanish and French; intermediate proficiency in Hebrew and Italian; lower intermediate proficiency in Dutch; and a working knowledge of Korean and Turkish. He holds three MA degrees—in German Studies (2007), Conference Interpretation (2010), and Linguistics (2013)—and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2021).