{"id":92148,"date":"2024-04-11T12:47:11","date_gmt":"2024-04-11T16:47:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=92148"},"modified":"2024-04-11T17:24:38","modified_gmt":"2024-04-11T21:24:38","slug":"neuroscience-research-edi-work-drew-horizon-scholarship-recipient-to-brock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2024\/04\/neuroscience-research-edi-work-drew-horizon-scholarship-recipient-to-brock\/","title":{"rendered":"Neuroscience research, EDI work drew Horizon scholarship recipient to Brock"},"content":{"rendered":"

NOTE: This is one in a series of articles on Brock\u2019s 2023-24 Horizon Graduate Student Scholarship recipients. Read other stories in the series on\u00a0<\/em>The Brock News<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Lamis El-Sabaa chose Brock for two reasons.<\/p>\n

One was the chance to work with graduate supervisor Karen Campbell, Associate Professor of Psychology and a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging.<\/p>\n

But just as important to El-Sabaa was Brock\u2019s commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI).<\/p>\n

The Master of Arts in Psychology student says she was excited to receive the Horizon Graduate Student Scholarship, which aligns with both her research priorities and her advocacy work around EDI.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a scholarship that I genuinely am so proud of because I\u2019m super passionate about how past experience informs research decisions being made right now,\u201d says El-Sabaa. \u201cI think it\u2019s such a great idea to highlight people of different backgrounds to show how that plays into their research.\u201d<\/p>\n

El-Sabaa\u2019s research interests stretch back to when her parents immigrated to Canada from the Middle East. They decided to teach her only English, reasoning that learning both English and their mother tongue of Arabic at the same time might cause delays in her overall learning.<\/p>\n

As an undergraduate student at the University of Windsor, El-Sabaa set out to find out if their concerns were justified, undertaking thesis research to compare monolingual and bilingual students on cognitive performance in memory and reading comprehension.<\/p>\n

She also took part in a separate project examining whether culture and ethnicity play a role during neuropsychological assessments of aging adults from diverse backgrounds.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted to know whether it\u2019s fair to administer the same type of tests to everybody when there are differences in language and culture \u2014 whether the tests made references to culture that might cause somebody who was less familiar with that culture to perform worse,\u201d says El-Sabaa.<\/p>\n

All of these research experiences have fed into El-Sabaa\u2019s current project in the Campbell Neurocognitive Aging Lab<\/a>,\u00a0where she is comparing the performance of younger adults and older adults on tasks in three cognitive areas:<\/p>\n