Faculty Research Interests

Behavioural Neuroscience

Nathan Insel, PhD

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 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 2024_2025 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 2024_2025 academic year 
• Research interests: The neuroethology of learning and memory.

Noam Miller, PhD 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 academic year
• Research interests: Collective cognition, the behaviour of animal groups, and animal learning and decision-making generally.

David White, PhD 

• Not accepting thesis students.
• Research interests: The evolutionary function, proximate mechanisms and development of social behaviour in animals: specifically, social learning, mate choice, and reproduction in songbirds.

Cognitive Neuroscience

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.

Jeffery A. Jones, PhD 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 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 2024_2025 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 2024_2025 academic year
• Research interests: The neural bases of somatosensory and visual perception.

Community

Ann Marie Beals 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 academic year
• Research interests: Afro-Indigenous identity; community health Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous, and Black communities; education; pedagogy; curriculum.

Livia Dittmer

• Not accepting thesis students.
• Research interests: Qualitative systems-analysis methods to examine topics in the Venn diagram of youth engagement, sustainability, and structure-agency. My research focuses on community-level learning, including how organizations use data to monitor outcomes and how groups articulate and share learning from grassroots action. Other interests include the philosophy of psychology and the role of spirituality in social wellbeing and transformation.

Maritt Kirst, PhD 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 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 

• Accepting MA students only 2024_2025 academic year
• Research interests: Social movements; grassroots organizing; participatory and community driven theory development and knowledge creation; disability justice and radical care.

 Melody Morton Ninomiya, PhD

(Note: home program is Health Sciences)

• Research Interests: Knowledge mobilization/sharing in community research contexts; community mental health; community program and service asset mapping; health and wellness research with Indigenous Peoples; institutional ethnography; fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

Manuel Riemer, PhD 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 academic year
• Research interests: Climate justice, psychology of sustainability, youth activism, cultures of sustainability in organizations and communities, systems thinking and complexity, mixed methods.

Ketan Shankardass, PhD 

(Note: home program is Health Sciences)

• Accepting PhD students only 2024_2025 academic year
• Research interests: Health equity solutions, including whole of government approaches, neighbourhood determinants of healthy and unhealthy copying, and political will/public opinion.

Ciann L.Wilson, PhD 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 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

Developmental

Meaghan Barlow, PhD

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 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 2024_2025 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 2024_2025 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 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 academic year
• 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 2024_2025 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 2024_2025 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 

(Note: Home program is Languages and Literatures)

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 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.

Social

Roger Buehler, PhD 

• Not accepting thesis students.
• Research interests: Social cognition and the self: planning, prediction, memory, mental imagery, mood regulation, motivation, goal pursuit.

Justin Cavallo, PhD 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 academic year
• 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 

• Not accepting thesis students. 
• 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.

Maxwell Gwynn, PhD

• Not accepting thesis students.

Christian Jordan, PhD 

• Not accepting thesis students 2024_2025 academic year 
• Research interests: Self-related processes, “dark” personality features, narcissism, counter-empathy, and self-enhancement.

Frank Kachanoff, PhD 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 academic year
  • Submit a little statement about why you want to work in our lab specifically and how it ties into your own interest and goals. You can also talk about your strengths and unique lived experiences that might be an asset to our lab.
• 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 2024_2025 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.

Pamela Sadler, PhD 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 academic year 
• Research interests: Interpersonal theory and processes of social interaction, moment-to-moment synchrony, interpersonal perceptions and biases, interpersonal characteristics of self-talk, statistical and research methods for studying two-person interactions, and applications of all of the foregoing within social, personality, and clinical psychology.

Anne Wilson, PhD 

• Accepting thesis students 2024_2025 academic year
• Research interests: Political polarization and sources of intergroup misperception, perceptions of historical injustice and its links to present day inequality, psychology of social media (outrage, misinformation, institutional trust), moral judgment online and offline, psychology of free expression and censorship, motivations for social change, the self and social cognition,  thinking about the (individual and collective) past and the future, the subjective experience of time, motivation and future goal-pursuit, beliefs about people's capacity for change and stability, sociocultural norms.