Please join this special Faculty of Arts research presentation featuring our current Lupina Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellows. Now in its fifth year, this postdoctoral program is generously sponsored by the Lupina Foundation and supports the best and brightest researchers addressing the social determinants of health.
Meet the speakers
Dr. Trent N. Cash, Lupina Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2025-27
Every year, millions of Canadians make complex medical decisions that require them to balance the pros and cons of multiple courses of action. To make good decisions and communicate their preferences to others, decision makers must understand their own decision-making processes. In this talk, I will share data from a series of studies exploring the accuracy of decision makers’ beliefs about how they make health-relevant decisions, such as which doctor to visit or which medication to take. I will then demonstrate that decision makers’ beliefs about their health decision-making processes are easily shifted. I will conclude with a discussion of how generative AI may be used to help decision makers develop a better understanding of how they make health-relevant decisions.
Dr. Rotem Paz, Lupina Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2025-27
Dr. Rotem Paz focuses on the contribution of autobiographical memories to self-schemas and mental health. Drawing on research at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and clinical psychology, this talk presents a memory-based framework for understanding how autobiographical experiences construct, and can reconstruct, our core beliefs about ourselves. Using the brain as a prediction machine as its guiding metaphor, it introduces the SCIL model of schema change and presents a research program targeting self-schemas in the context of social anxiety and loneliness across various populations.
Dr. Krystle Shore, Lupina Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow, 2024-25 and 2025-26
Canada's long-term care (LTC) sector has invested heavily in AI-powered electronic health record (EHR) systems as a response to persistent care challenges, but whether these technologies meaningfully address those challenges remains an open question. Drawing on vendor marketing, government policy, and LTC staff perspectives, this project examines how EHR systems are rationalized and how they operate in practice. My findings suggest these systems misalign with the realities of frontline LTC work and underminine caregivers' capacity for person-centered care decisions. The result is a performative crisis response that introduces new forms of algorithmic control over an already-strained workforce—one composed overwhelmingly of women, many of them racialized and in precarious employment—with direct consequences for the quality of care received by Canada's aging population.
Light refreshments will be served. Your registration is appreciated but not required.