Faculty Accepting Students for the 2025/2026 Academic Year

• Suicide; suicide prevention and postvention; social determinants of mental health; Indigenous peoples health; the effects of criminalization and incarceration on mental health; qualitative methodologies; trauma and violence-informed community-based interventions. 

• Attention-Deficit/Hyperacticity Disorder (ADHD); pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions; cognitive function; neurodevelopment

• Vocational and career psychology
• Life career development, and career theories and counselling approaches

Development of language and literacy skills in children enrolled in French immersion programs:

• Cross-language transfer between English (L1) and French (2)
• Performance of English language learners (trilinguals) in French immersion
• Early identification of reading difficulties and reading interventions for French immersion children
• Poor reading comprehension in French immersion children

Language, literacy and well-being in Arabic-speaking and Syrian refugee children:

• Development of English and maintenance of Arabic skills
• Contributions of demographic factors (e.g., SES, parent language, home language) to literacy development
• Relationship among language, literacy and well-being

• Developing the Assistive Technology Selection Protocol to guide partners to identify the right technology
   
• Academic interventions for student-aged child who have learning difficulties, particularly:
  • The selection of assistive technology to address academic skill deficits
  • Increasing the effectiveness of assistive technology
  • Development of learning profiles to better identify academic intervention

• Early cognitive development
• Young children's learning about the world through symbolic means, such as language, pictures, videos, and replica objects
• Children's use of language to think and communicate about what is perceptually not present
• The social, linguistic and representational factors that influence children’s learning about the world

• Risk and wellness behaviours during emerging adulthood (ages 18-25)
• The influence of distal (early relationships, attachment styles, child maltreatment) and proximal (individual differences in emotion regulation, motives for risk behaviours, mood, interpersonal interaction) factors on the everyday risk and wellness behaviours of emerging adults

• Psychosocial factors in the well-being of underserved populations; women’s experiences with poverty and intimate partner violence; effect of systems-level responses to women affected by these stressors.

• Promotion of mental health and well-being across the lifespan
• Prevention of self-injurious behaviours (e.g., nonsuicidal self-injury, suicidal behavior)
• Identifying protective and risk factors for self-injury
• Development of integrated mental health assessments to facilitate the early identification of students at risk for self-injury in schools and the larger community

• intersection of education, psychology, and neuroscience
• how people learn and do mathematics, with a particular focus on the role of spatial thinking in mathematics
• aim to build better bridges between cognitive science and education.

• Language assessment
• Educational measurement
• Program evaluation
• Development of reading skills among K-12 school students from Grades 3 to 10
• The effects of technology-rich learning environments on students' self-regulation, emotion, and cognitive development

• Children’s language and cognitive development (executive functions, memory)
• Literacy; including cross-linguistic comparisons, bilingualism and biliteracy
• How experiences shape cognitive development; impacts of poverty and adversity on the brain
• Neuroimaging techniques (fNIRS, fMRI) to understand neurodevelopment and learning
• Global child development and education, mainly focusing on sub-Saharan Africa

• Applications of machine learning in psychological and educational research
• Applied statistics and quantitative methods in psychological and educational research including topics such as latent variable and multilevel modelling
• Psychometrics and issues around educational and psychological measurement
• Causal inference and missing data analysis
• Collaborative research in education, psychology, and public health

• Development of Moral Conceptions of Lying in Adolescents
• Development of Face Processing Expertise
• Neural Mechanisms of Face Processing in Children and Adults
• Neural Mechanisms of Lying in Children and Adults

• Assessing the quality of interactions between early childhood educators and children and between family members and children. Examining how these interactions impact children’s wellbeing.
• Conceptualizing and assessing quality in early childhood education setting for quality improvement and oversight purposes. This involves studies that look at whether quality (e.g., the way that educators interact with children) is a child, educator, classroom or centre level characteristic.
• Examining how education systems need to change to support children who will enter an evolving work landscape. This work involves integration of existing evidence in terms of what are the key future skills and government programs that can support the Canadian population to accommodate to changing demands. It also means integrating evidence on how to effectively teach key skills to young children as well as generating new evidence in this area.

• children’s and adolescents’ knowledge, reasoning, perceptions, and experiences of the youth justice system, their understanding of rights, and their evolving legal capacities
• effective rehabilitation for justice-involved youth in the context of the risk-need-responsivity framework, including a focus on Indigenous youth; and the role of mental health issues in youth justice system involvement

• Play-based learning in the classroom; early literacy development; assessment in play-based classrooms; kindergarten; teacher practice.

• The finding, casing, and evaluating of exemplary programs in the prevention of traumatic injury
• The role of early intervention in a full local health integration network effort to prevent falls in later in life
• Evaluation of province-wide investigations of a multiple hospital and community programs to prevent inflicted infant head trauma
• The development of a public health initiative to prevent children's injuries
• Design of safe non-risk adverse playgrounds for special needs children

• Effects of childhood stress and adversity on cognitive development and mental health
• Interaction between biological (genetic) and experiential (environmental) factors on development
• Resiliency in the aftermath of adverse childhood experiences
• Physiological, neural, cognitive, and socio-emotional pathways linking early adversity to mental health in childhood and adolescence
• Biomedical and prenatal exposures and child development

• Computer supported learning environments and flexible modes of education; technology, play and gaming; emotion and cognitive engagement.