Hi and welcome to the Developmental Processes in Health and Well-Being Lab! I can supervise students in the Department of Child and Youth Studies (Masters and Ph.D. programs) and the Department of Psychology (Masters and Ph.D. programs). Whether I am supervising students in the Department of Child and Youth Studies or Psychology, graduate students will have plenty of opportunities in our lab to learn essential skills that will prepare them for careers in academia and industry! Exciting opportunities will include being able to contribute to our ongoing multi- and transdisciplinary research projects that examine how perfectionism is understood and experienced by adolescents as well as being able to carve out your own area of research that falls under the umbrella of our lab’s general research focus. Opportunities for training in both advanced quantitative and qualitative research methods will also be made available for graduate students. For example, we conduct focus groups, interviews, and photo voice studies with teens along with traditional survey and ecological momentary studies. We are also going to be assessing links among personality, stress, and adolescent-parent relationship functioning incorporating a multidisciplinary framework (e.g., physiology, neuroendocrinology, psychology, sociology) and the use of multiple cutting-edge and converging methods (e.g., heart-rate variability, observation, biomarkers, EMA, photo elicitation, phenomenology).

Lab Expectations:

Graduate students will be expected to be involved in all stages of research from concept inception through to knowledge mobilization with a focus on transferability of skills to other contexts. Specifically, this will involve designing a study, collecting and analyzing data, and the dissemination of research results. Graduate students will be expected to attend weekly lab meetings and to contribute to a respectful and collaborative teamwork environment. Graduate students should also expect to be involved in manuscript preparation, attend national and international conferences, and be involved in grant applications.

Mentoring Style:

I subscribe to a developmental model of supervision. This means that students receive more intensive support in their initial training (BA, MA), becoming increasingly independent as they start to establish their own research focus (with continued support, of course!). Thus, senior graduate students will help to mentor undergraduates, providing an opportunity to gain experience with research supervision and leadership. I tend to meet weekly with my students so that we can work together to develop an exciting research project, learn new methods, discuss strengths and weaknesses, goals, and their overall progress. I strongly support individualized training such that I believe every student is unique and that their training should be tailored to meet their individuals goals and needs for their career trajectory.

Thank you for considering conducting graduate work in the Developmental Processes in Health and Well-Being Lab! Please reach out to the lab if you have any questions.

To learn more about graduate studies in the Department of Child and Youth Studies, please click here.

To learn more about graduate studies in the Department of Psychology, please click here.