Alana Kyriakakis, JD
General Counsel and Vice President
Alana Kyriakakis assumed the role of University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) general counsel and vice president in July 2023 after serving as acting general counsel for 11 months. As general counsel, Kyriakakis is UMB’s chief legal officer, providing executive-level advice and direction on a diverse range of critical and strategic legal matters impacting the University. Reporting to UMB’s president, she is responsible for working collaboratively and creatively across the institution to develop solutions to legal matters, establish processes and practices to maximize opportunity, and provide expertise to reduce legal and other risk.
Before becoming acting general counsel in August 2022, Kyriakakis had been the University’s labor and employment attorney since 2014. She advised UMB leadership on all aspects of faculty and staff personnel matters across the institution’s six professionals schools, Graduate School, and central administration. She regularly provides training and education to leaders and professional organizations, and she has provided guest lectures at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law on the role of in-house employment lawyers.
Because of her expertise, Kyriakakis was asked to join UMB’s Crisis Management Advisory Group throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, advising University leadership on the many employment law considerations presented by the crisis. Based on her contributions, she was nominated by UMB leadership and honored in the 2020-2021 “On the Front Lines: UMB Champions of Excellence” campaign.
Before joining UMB, Kyriakakis practiced law for 10 years in Georgia, where she began her career as an employment law litigator in private practice and a special assistant attorney general representing public entities and higher education institutions in complex discrimination and employment litigation. After leaving private practice, she began her career as a university attorney working for institutions in the University System of Georgia. Her experience included representation of the state’s designated health sciences university and its only public medical school and as the general counsel for a small undergraduate university.
Kyriakakis received a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of Oklahoma in 1997 with a minor in classical Greek. She earned her law degree from the University of South Carolina in 2004.