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Apply for PS499
PS499* is the Department of Psychology's honours (undergraduate) thesis course.
Enrolling in PS499 is a competitive process and, unfortunately, not all students who meet the minimum eligibility criteria will be able to enrol. Enrolment in the course is limited by the number of supervisors available in any given year and the number of students they can supervise. Although faculty members typically supervise one or two thesis students each year, in some cases they may be on sabbatical or other leave or have commitments that prevent them from being able to supervise students.
However, you never know until you apply if you will get in, so if you feel like this could be an exciting and enriching experience for you, then we encourage you to apply.
Application Dates and Deadlines
- January 27, 2025: Deadline for students to submit an online application.
- February 3-28, 2025: Period to meet with potential faculty supervisors.
- March 4, 2025: Deadline for students to submit updated rankings (if necessary).
Eligibility Criteria
- Enrolment in Year 4 of the Honours BA: Research Specialist, Honours BSc Psychology and Neuroscience, or a joint BSc Psychology program.
- Completion of PS394 and one of PS395, PS397, PS398, or PS487 by the end of winter term of Year 3. It is also expected that, as part of your program, you will have completed one 300-level research methods course and one 400-level seminar by the end of Winter term Year 3.
- These courses are prerequisites for PS499 because they help prepare students to complete an honours thesis, but students who don’t have one, or in some cases two, of them are still accepted into the course every year and often excel in it.
- A minimum GPA of 8.5 in psychology courses by the end of winter term of Year 3 is normally needed to be competitive.
- However, students with lower GPAs will still be considered. If you started to do very well in the last few psychology courses you have taken, for example, this can make up for some of the lower grades you might have received before. In the application form there is an optional section where you can explain why your grades may have been lower than what was expected of you.
Application Steps
1. Identify Faculty Members You Would Like to Work With
Consult our list below of faculty members accepting thesis students next year along with information about their research interests. You might also visit their website or download and take a quick look at recent publications authored by faculty members to learn more about their research.
Identify six potential supervisors who you are interested in working with. Because some research areas are extremely popular, you might not be able to work with the faculty members you most want to work with.
Nathan Insel, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Dynamics and neural mechanisms of dyadic social interactions, including social expectations, using a lens of computational behaviour and systems neuroscience.
Paul Mallet, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Preference for students with experience working with laboratory rats (e.g., have completed PS363).
- Research interests: Behavioural pharmacology of cannabinoids.
Diano Marrone, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: The neuroethology of learning and memory.
Bruce McKay, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research Interests: Recreational psychoactive drug use, relationships between alcohol and drug use and academic outcomes.
Noam Miller, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Collective cognition, the behaviour of animal groups, and animal learning and decision-making generally.
David White, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: The evolutionary function, proximate mechanisms and development of social behaviour in animals: specifically, social learning, mate choice, and reproduction in songbirds.
- Preference for students with experience working with animals (e.g., have completed PS361).
Todd Ferretti, PhD
- Not accepting thesis students.
- Research interests: Language and cognitive processes; computational models of language processing; electro–physiological studies of language comprehension and production.
Ali Hashemi, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Office/lab located at Milton campus, but meetings will happen virtually or in-person at Waterloo. Research data will be collected through online studies.
- Research interests: Human visual perception (e.g., face perception, perceptual learning), attention, memory, mental imagery, and motivation. If/How are all of these connected to each other?
Jeffery A. Jones, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Speech (human communication), music, and the comprehensive effects of cannabis on cognition, perception, and motor control.
Elizabeth Olds, PhD
- Not accepting thesis students.
- Research interests: Human selective attention, visual search, and visual object recognition.
Nichole Scheerer, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Sensory processing in typically developing children and adults, as well as children and adults with neurodevelopment disabilities like autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit and/or hyperactivity disorder.
Philip Servos, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: The neural bases of somatosensory and visual perception.
Ann Marie Beals, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Afro-Indigenous identity; community health Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous, and Black communities; education; pedagogy; curriculum, environment and sustainability, disability justice.
Alexis Buettgen, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Critical disability studies, climate justice, socioeconomic poverty, work/employment, critical theory, community psychology, participatory methodologies, equity-based co-design/co-creation, program evaluation and monitoring.
Maritt Kirst, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Mental health and addictions; homelessness; social capital and health; health equity; integrated health and social care programs for patients with complex care needs; evaluation of complex health interventions; mixed methods.
Natalie Kivell, PhD
- Not accepting thesis students.
- Research interests: Social movements; grassroots organizing; participatory and community driven theory development and knowledge creation; disability justice and radical care.
Manuel Riemer, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Climate justice, psychology of sustainability, youth activism, cultures of sustainability in organizations and communities, systems thinking and complexity, mixed methods.
Ciann L.Wilson, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Intersectional, critical race and anti-colonial theories; Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities; public health; the social determinants of health; community development; education; community-based interventions; arts-based, qualitative and Indigenous research
Meaghan Barlow, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Lifespan, social, personality, and health psychology; age-related structures, functions, and consequences of emotional experiences; motivational factors that protect older adults’ well-being and health well into advanced old age; experiences, beliefs, and definitions of well-being across the adult lifespan.
Alexandra Gottardo, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Reading acquisition, the development of reading in English as a Second Language learners, bilingualism, multilingualism, the development of phonological skills, reading comprehension, vocabulary development, reading disabilities in children and adults, literacy interventions.
Marc Jambon, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- I am looking for students who are interested in pursuing a graduate degree in a research-oriented program in developmental psychology, clinical psychology, or related disciplines.
- Previous experience and comfort interacting with children/adolescents in some capacity (e.g., having younger siblings, working at a daycare) is ideal.
- Basic proficiency in visual arts (e.g., drawing, illustration, or graphic design) is desirable but absolutely not required.
- All students who join the lab must pass a vulnerable sector check and have some availability on occasional evenings and/or weekends to accommodate lab visits for families with small children.
- Research interests: Moral development (judgments, emotions), aggression, and prosociality in early and middle childhood (~4 to 8 years of age).
Tobias Krettenauer, PhD
- Not accepting thesis students.
- Research interests: Moral development across the life span with particular focus on moral identity and moral emotions (pride, guilt, shame), development of pro-environmental behavior in children and youth.
Joanne Lee, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Students should be proficient in statistics using SPSS.
- Research interests: How technology influences cognitive development, early language and mathematics learning, and longitudinal associations between early childhood learning and later academic competence; impact of social media and technology on young adults, and behavioural decision making.
Kim Roberts, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Children's memory and learning, knowledge formation in education, source credibility, evaluation of online sources of information, parent-child reminiscing, children's reasoning about EDI, eyewitness testimony, children and the legal system, mindfulness-based approaches to emotional and cognitive development.
John W. Schwieter, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Bi-/multilingualism; second+ language development; psycholinguistics; cognitive and neuroscientific effects and processes of second+ language acquisition; translation and interpreting processes.
Eileen Wood, PhD
- Not accepting thesis students.
- Research interests: Cognitive development, memory strategies, learning in the classroom, technology in the classroom and in the home, educational applications and interventions impacting social and cognitive development across the lifespan.
Roger Buehler, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Social cognition and the self: planning, prediction, memory, mental imagery, motivation, goal pursuit.
Justin Cavallo, PhD
- Not accepting thesis students.
- Research interests: Close relationships, motivation, goals and self-regulation, social support.
Mark Eys, PhD
(Note: home department is Kinesiology and Physical Education).
- Not accepting thesis students.
- Research interests: Group dynamics in sport and exercise; perceptions of cohesion within youth physical activity groups as well as role perceptions (i.e., role ambiguity and role acceptance) in sport teams.
Mindi Foster, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: How experiences of discrimination and responses to that discrimination affect psychological (e.g., self-acceptance, growth) and subjective (e.g., mood, life satisfaction) well-being.
Christian Jordan, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Self-related processes, “dark” personality features, narcissism, counter-empathy, and self-enhancement.
Frank Kachanoff, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Social identities – the values, beliefs and practices we associate with important social groups we feel a strong connection to.
Nancy Kocovski, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: Social anxiety and other anxiety disorders, cognitive behaviour therapy, mindfulness, comorbidity between anxiety and depression, comorbidity between anxiety and substance use disorders, rumination and coping.
Anne Wilson, PhD
- Accepting thesis students 2025/26 academic year
- Research interests: 1) moral judgment online and "cancel vs accountability culture" 2) politics and polarization: how we misperceive political opponents, sometimes disliking them for beliefs few of them actually hold; 3) social media and how it may distort people's views of reality (about themselves, their relationships, their appearance, social and political issues, injustice in the world). 4) the psychology of censorship, taboo, self-censorship and dissent; 5) the social cognition of self and identity over time, how and when people perceive change or continuity with past and future selves
2. Complete and Submit the Online Application by January 27, 2025
On the PS499 application form, you will be asked to:
- indicate the areas of psychology that you are interested in studying.
- list the faculty members you are interested in working with along with the areas of research you are interested in studying with them,
- include a short personal statement describing why you are interested in completing a thesis and your future goals, and
- upload an unofficial transcript and resume listing your employment and volunteer experiences.
You should prepare your personal statement and have these documents ready before you begin the online application form because the form will not allow you to save and continue. Find tips and on what to include in your personal statement.
The online application also has a section that allows you to optionally describe why your grades in any course or term might not reflect your true abilities or potential.
3. Meeting with Faculty Members
Between February 3-28, 2025, faculty members will receive your application materials and may contact you for additional information or to arrange a time to meet with you to discuss the possibility of completing a thesis.
4. Changing your Rankings (optional)
By Tuesday March 4th, 2025 if you want to change your rankings email psychadmin@wlu.ca with your new rankings listed in numerical order.
If you do not want to make any changes in your original rankings no action is necessary. To increase your chances of matching, we encourage you to rank several (six are recommended) potential supervisors. We will try to match you with a supervisor as far up your list of preferences as possible.
5. Faculty Match and Eligibility Confirmation
As soon as possible after Tuesday, March 4th you will be notified by email if you are successfully matched with a supervisor. Please be patient, as this process could take several weeks. If a match is not possible based on the list you submitted, you may be contacted to consider whether there are other areas of interest that may interest you to facilitate further matching.Once Winter grades have been submitted, your eligibility for PS499 will be confirmed. Your acceptance to the course may depend on meeting the eligibility criteria at this time.