Faculty Research Interests
Behavioural Neuroscience
Nathan Insel, PhD: Dynamics and neural mechanisms of dyadic social interactions, including social expectations, using a lens of computational behaviour and systems neuroscience.
Paul Mallet, PhD: The behavioural and neural effects of drugs, with a special emphasis on drugs of abuse and certain plant extracts.
Diano Marrone, PhD: Systems neuroscience, functional neuroanatomy, neurobiology of aging, immediate-early gene expression.
Bruce McKay, PhD: Recreational psychoactive drug use, with particular interests in trends in undergraduate student alcohol and other drug use (with studies emphasizing cannabis, MDMA, nootropics and the use of psychedelics), relationships between alcohol and drug use and academic outcomes, the reasons underpinning recreational alcohol and drug use by students, harmful outcomes associated with excessive alcohol and drug use, and harm reduction.
Noam Miller, PhD: Collective cognition, the behaviour of animal groups, and animal learning and decision-making generally.
David White, PhD: 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: Language and cognitive processes; computational models of language processing; electro–physiological studies of language comprehension and production.
Jeffery A. Jones, PhD: Human communication through speech, music and other acoustic signals. Research topics include sensory-motor control during speech, singing, and music production, as well as multisensory perception. Applied work looks at communication disorders caused by Parkinson's disease, stuttering, as well as attention and cognitive loads during communication while driving. Techniques used include behavioural measures, EEG, and fMRI.
Elizabeth Olds, PhD: Human selective attention, visual search, and visual object recognition.
Nichole Scheerer, PhD: 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. These studies focus on how differences in sensory processing affect speech, language, social communication, adaptive functioning, and anxiety, among other things. Applied work also looks at ways to improve the quality of life of autistic people through universal design and increasing autism acceptance.
Philip Servos, PhD: The neural bases of somatosensory and visual perception.
Community
Ann Marie Beals: Afro-Indigenous identity, community health Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous, and Black communities, education, pedagogy, curriculum.
Maritt Kirst, PhD: 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: I am currently working on a participatory project with community organizers engaged in online mutual aid spaces in response to COVID-19. We plan to document, co-learn, and co-create hyperlocal (and more broadly applicable) knowledge, tools, and supports for community organizers across Mutual Aid groups and communities during COVID-19.
Melody Morton Ninomiya, PhD: 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: Sustainability, global climate change mitigation and adaptation, youth engagement, environmental action, environmental justice, social innovation for complex challenges, evaluation and sustainability of social programs, mixed methods, multilevel modelling.
Ketan Shankardass, PhD: Health equity solutions, including whole of government approaches, neighbourhood determinants of healthy and unhealthy copying, and political will/public opinion.
Ciann L.Wilson, PhD: 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 methodologies.
Developmental
Meaghan Barlow, PhD: Adult development and aging, emotions, self-regulation, goal adjustment, well-being, and physical health.
Alexandra Gottardo, PhD: Reading acquisition, reading disabilities in children and adults, the development of reading in English as a Second Language learners, the development of phonological skills, reading comprehension, vocabulary development.
Marc Jambon, PhD: The development of moral judgments and emotions, aggression, and prosociality; callous-unemotional tendencies, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism in early and middle childhood.
Tobias Krettenauer, PhD: Development of moral reasoning, moral emotions and moral motivation, identity and ego development, volunteering, positive youth development.
Joanne Lee, PhD: Numeracy and mathematics development, mathematics education, longitudinal study of language and mathematics development, gender differences in cognitive development, language acquisition and cross-linguistic studies.
Kim Roberts, PhD: Children's memory and learning, source monitoring, eyewitness testimony, children and the legal system, mindfulness-based approaches to emotional and cognitive development, knowledge formation in education.
John W. Schwieter, PhD: Bi-/multilingualism; second+ language development; psycholinguistics; cognitive and neuroscientific effects and processes of second+ language acquisition; translation and interpreting processes.
Eileen Wood, PhD: 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: Social cognition and the self: planning, prediction, memory, mental imagery, mood regulation, motivation, goal pursuit.
Justin Cavallo, PhD: Close relationships, motivation, goals and self-regulation, social support.
Mark Eys, PhD: Research interests generally encompass group dynamics in sport and exercise. Currently, Dr. Eys is examining 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: 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: Social psychological and cognitive factors in hypnotic responding, eyewitness memory and testimony, and facial composite (police sketch) production and recognition.
Christian Jordan, PhD: Self-related processes, self-esteem, narcissism, self-enhancement, and social cognition.
Frank Kachanoff, PhD: Social identity, intergroup relations, and social hierarchy: How does "who we are" impact "who I am"? When do groups fight for power and status? Why is social hierarchy so ubiquitous? How can we combine lab-based and community-driven research to address real-world problems?
Nancy Kocovski, PhD: 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: Interpersonal theory and processes of social interaction, moment-to-moment synchrony, nonverbal and paralinguistic behaviour, automatic and controlled processes, interpersonal perceptions and biases, statistical and research methods for studying two-person interactions, individual differences and underlying mechanisms of hypnosis, and applications of all of the foregoing within social, personality, and clinical psychology.
Anne Wilson, PhD: The self and social cognition: thinking about the past and the future, the psychological experience of time, motivation and future goal-pursuit, beliefs about change and stability, sociocultural norms, interpersonal relationships over time.