Our Team

Evan Risko

Lab Director

Evan is an associate professor and Cognitive Research Area Head at the University of Waterloo. He has published over 100 papers, received research funding from numerous agencies (i.e., NSERC, SSHRC, CFI), worked with numerous industry partners and received various accolades for his research. His research focuses on education and training practices, distributed cognition, and effort perception.

Laura Bianchi

Graduate Student

Laura Bianchi is completing her PhD in Cognitive Psychology after completing her MA with Evan Risko. Laura's research focuses on education, specifically learning with multimedia in online environments. Her current research examines learning, cognitive load, attention, as well as students' assessments of their learning (metacognition and affect).

April Pereira

Graduate Student

April is completing her PhD in Cognitive Psychology after completing her MA with Evan Risko. April’s research focuses on cognitive offloading and metamemory. Her current research focuses on pupillometry as a possible tool to measure cognitive effort.

Julianna Salvatierra

Graduate Student

Julianna is completing the MA/PhD program in Cognitive Psychology. Her research interests include memory, learning, and metacognition in the context of education. Currently, she is investigating the effects of video quality in online learning environments.

Kate Van Kessel

Lab Manager

Kate recently completed her undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Waterloo. She completed her thesis on how cognitive elements involved in parenting (i.e., parental reflective functioning) relate to adolescent wellbeing. Currently, her research focuses on perceptions of effort.

Michelle Ashburner

Graduate Student

Michelle is completing her PhD in Cognitive Psychology. Her research focus is on how individuals judge the effortfulness of given cognitive tasks. Currently, she is investigating the way effort judgments, and the cues used to infer them, change across certain contexts.

Megan Kelly

Graduate Student

Megan is completing her PhD in Cognitive Psychology. Her research focuses on memory and how it is influenced by the environment around us. This work involves a variety of subtopics within traditional memory research as well as considering the various qualities of external/environmental memory supports. 

Xinyi Lu

Graduate Student

Xinyi completed her undergraduate and MA degrees at the National University of Singapore. She joined the University of Waterloo in 2019 to complete her PhD in Cognitive Psychology. Xinyi’s research focuses on the broad topics of memory and learning — both within the lab as well as in applied educational contexts. Currently, she is studying how semantic categories and concepts influence both memory and metacognition.

Research Assistants


Sirui Wang

Sirui Wang

  • Undergraduate Thesis Student


Dasha Tuzova

Dasha Tuzova

  • Research Assistant and Thesis Student

Wissam Al-Munajed

  • Research Assistant and Thesis Student


Nikhil Chauhan

  • Research Assistant and Thesis Student


Kitty Lamar

Kitty Lamarr

  • Research Assistant and Former Undergraduate Thesis Student


Jaishish Gurbaksh

  • Research Assistant and Former Apprenticeship Student


Kritika Gaba

Kritika Gaba

  • Research Assistant and Former Apprenticeship Student


Nicholas Lee

  • Research Assistant


Patrick Tsapoitis

​​​​​​​Patrick Tsapoitis   

  • Research Assistant


Anna Zavadskaya

Anna Zavadskaya        

  • Research Assistant


Floyd Tang

  • Research Assistant


Sofia Sierra

  • Research Assistant

Anushka Gavali           

  • Research Assistant​​​​​​