Wendy Allen has worked in higher education nationally and internationally for over 30 years.  Most recently, from 1998 to 2007, she was the Project Director of the McGill-State Islamic University Yogyakarta cooperation, a 3-phase institutional development project focusing on Indonesia’s Islamic higher education network.  The project has brought Indonesian academics and administrators to Montreal and sent Canadian professors and graduate students to Indonesia.  She also worked with TECSULT, a Montreal engineering firm, as the Academic Coordinator and Deputy Director of the CIDA-funded General Training Program for Indonesia.  In 1977, she went to China for the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada on an international exchange and returned with her family in 1979 for two years to develop a language training program with professors from the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages (now the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies).

Her first foray into the world of higher education abroad was as an undergraduate student at the University of Chile.  She returned to Chile as a graduate student in Linguistics and later completed her Masters in Linguistics at McGill University.