Keynote Speaker

Dr. Scheffer is an Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario, in the Department of Psychology. His research broadly examines the utility of socioemotional processes such as empathy and compassion for building interpersonal and intergroup connection. He studies how mental effort perceptions, neural damage, and neurodegeneration impact people's propensity and capacity to share in and understand the perspectives of other people as well as foster concern for their well-being. Further, he examines how these same processes wax and wane across challenging interpersonal and intergroup contexts, such as in the context of political rivals, in caregivers of people diagnosed with neurodegenerative disease, and in forging allyship to address social injustices.

Prior to arriving at Western, Dr. Scheffer completed his HBSc at University of Toronto Scarborough, his MA at University of Iowa, his PhD at the Pennsylvania State University, and a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California Berkeley.

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