Fatima Wasif
Published September 2025
Fatima is a 4th year Ph.D. Candidate in the Clinical Psychology program, working under the supervision of Dr. Tara McAuley at the Child and Adolescent Neuropsychology Lab. Her research focuses on understanding how social (perceived quality and quantity of social support) and cognitive (executive functions) factors independently and jointly predict well-being among young people across educational transitions. In her M.A she investigated this phenomenon in adolescents entering high school, while her Ph.D. dissertation focuses on young adults entering first year university. Building on this work, Fatima is developing valid and reliable survey tools to measure how individuals strategically use their environment—including physical implements, digital technologies and social networks—to offload cognitive demands in daily life. Her overarching goal is to inform prevention and intervention efforts to enhance student health and success post-academic transitions. Her work has been supported by SSHRC and OGS grants at both the Master’s and Doctoral levels.
Alongside her primary research focus, Fatima has also actively engaged in research-based collaborations with the Children and Youth Planning Table of Waterloo Region, with Dr. Dillon Browne. In this domain, her work examines risk and promotive factors for youth belonging and well-being across ecological systems.
Clinically, Fatima has developed a strong background in neuropsychological assessment, completing practica at renowned academic medical centers like The Hospital for Sick Children and McMaster Children’s Hospital. She is excited to continue to contribute to furthering wellness in young people through her research and clinical work.
- Visit Fatima on Google Scholar
Publications:
- Wasif, F., & McAuley, T. (2024). Exploring close relationships and executive functions as unique and joint predictors of adolescent subjective well-being across the transition to high school. Journal of Happiness Studies, 25(6), 64.
- Wasif, F., Smith, J. A., & Browne, D. T. (2025). Youth's sense of belonging and associated risk and promotive factors: An ecological systems network analysis. Clinical child psychology and psychiatry, 13591045251380305. Advance online publication.
Pearlyn Ng
Published September 2025
Pearlyn is a 4th-year PhD Candidate in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology program, working under the supervision of Dr. Douglas J. Brown. She completed her Masters of Science in Management at Toronto Metropolitan University in 2022 under the supervision of Dr. Kristyn A. Scott (who is a U Waterloo I-O alumni!). Pearlyn’s research focuses on (1) dynamic perspectives of leadership, specifically how leader-follower exchanges and implicit theories shape leadership emergence and impact, and (2) the role of gender in advancing more inclusive conceptions of leadership. Her research is supported by the SSHRC Canadian Doctoral Scholarship, and she has presented her work at several national and international conferences, including the Academy of Management and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. In 2024, her research received the first-place award for EDI Research Poster from the Canadian Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology.
Alongside her research, Pearlyn is actively involved in the academic and local community. She is a student mentor in the LIFT program and Big/Little Sib program at U Waterloo. This year, she served as a measurement mentor in the Measurement 4 Change program in Waterloo Region and provided measurement and analysis support to the Woolwich Counseling Centre. She is also a volunteer with the Canadian Association for Girls in Science, supporting programs and activities that inspire girls and gender-diverse youth to pursue STEM fields.
Neil Wegenschimmel
Published August 2025
Neil is a PhD candidate in the Decision, Inference, and Cognitive Economics (DICE) lab under the supervision of Dr. Samuel Johnson. His research focuses on understanding manifestations of extreme political belief and the social, cognitive, and environmental factors that inform these belief structures, as well as their impact on social networks and political outcomes.
In particular, he examines how individuals navigate existential uncertainty in social, political, and informational domains, with an emphasis on the role of conspiracy mentality and existential nihilism in shaping authoritarian attitudes across the political spectrum. His work, spanning multiple studies across the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, reveals distinct patterns whereby certain cognitive dispositions inform both left- and right-wing authoritarianism. These findings also illuminate how emotional states such as loneliness and uncertainty indirectly foster authoritarian beliefs via patterns of thought, and how factual information alone may not be sufficient to shift perceptions that underlie extremism. Together, they carry implications for understanding belief formation in an era of misinformation and digitally mediated uncertainty.
Neil’s research has been supported by grants from SSHRC at both the Master’s and Doctoral levels, and he has presented his work internationally at conferences in the United States, Europe, and South Korea. He is a previous holder of the Mark Zanna Graduate Scholarship and was recently awarded the Canadian Psychological Association’s Certificate of Academic Excellence for his Master’s thesis.
Outside of research, Neil enjoys engaging in mentorship through the DICE Lab Summer Internship Program and teaching—most recently as an instructor for PSYCH 101 this past winter.
Neil was recently profiled by International Society for the Science of Existential Psychology.
Recent publications:
- Smith, J. A., Dorfman, A., Wegenschimmel, N., & Grossmann, I. (2025). Wisdom reconsidered: A dynamic network account of metacognition and complex thought. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001821
- Wegenschimmel, N., McLaughlin, N. (2024). The Great Canadian Paradox: Jordan Peterson, Right-Wing Canadian Internet Personalities, and the End of Canadian Exceptionalism? Society 61, 685–699. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-024-01025-0
Amy Barron
Published August 2025
Amy Barron is a PhD candidate in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology program, working under the supervision of Dr. Ramona Bobocel. She has two complementary research streams aimed at examining biases that undermine managers’ fair treatment of their employees. In one line of research, she investigates how perpetrator performance biases how managers react and respond to workplace mistreatment claims. In a second research line, driven by her interest in gender equality, she examines how the gender of a recipient biases how managers deliver bad news such as negative performance evaluations. Through her research, Amy hopes to improve the way managers interact with their employees during these challenging situations.
Amy’s research has been supported by SSHRC grants and her contributions to the field have been recognized at prominent conferences, earning accolades such as the CSIOP Best Poster Award and the RHR Kendall Award. She has also recently been awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student Performance Award by the I-O Area in recognition of her research and service to the department.
Outside of research, Amy has been an instructor for PSYCH 492 where her dedication to her students and effectiveness as an educator has been recognized in her strong course evaluations and the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.
Candice Rubie
Published August 2025
Candice is a 2nd-year PhD student in the Developmental Psychology program, working under the supervision of Dr. Stephanie Denison. Her research examines children’s cognitive development in early childhood, including their Approximate Number System (ANS) acuity, risk taking and attitude formation towards novel objects, and responses to failure feedback. Candice’s research has been supported by grants from SSHRC, NSERC, and OGS, and has been presented at several national and international conferences, including the Society for Research in Child Development, Cognitive Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.
Alongside her research, Candice thoroughly enjoys taking an active role in supporting student life, both within and beyond her department. She has taken on several meaningful volunteer positions to contribute to the university community, including serving as one of the lead organizers of the Psychology Discovery Conference, a project review committee member for the Graduate Student Endowment Fund, and former executive member of GASP. Candice is always eager to embrace new challenges and experiences, and to expand her skill set whenever possible. She is concurrently completing the Graduate Diploma in Computational Data Analytics for the Social Sciences and Humanities and the Certificate in University Teaching alongside her degree.
Samantha Ayers-Glassey
Published August 2025
Samantha is a 4th-year PhD student in the Cognitive Neuroscience program under Dr. Daniel Smilek’s supervision. She has secured over $200,000 CAD in competitive research funding, including ranking in the top 5% of Psychology applicants for the prestigious NSERC CGS-D scholarship. Samantha is currently completing the Certificate of University Teaching. She enjoys teaching and mentoring undergraduate students as a sessional course instructor, teaching assistant, and honours thesis co-supervisor.
Samantha’s research focuses on how individuals monitor, recall, and adapt their cognitive experiences over time. Her dissertation investigates whether individuals can accurately report their previous momentary experiences of attention, which has involved co-developing a novel video-stimulated recall paradigm for capturing self-reported attention and exploring whether accurate reports are based on memory and/or metacognitive inference. This method stemmed partly from her experience using a similar approach to study self-perceptions in second-language learners during her undergraduate studies.
Samantha has also explored attention and affect in contexts such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), social media scrolling, and video-mediated communication using multiple methods (self-report, behaviour, psychophysiology), and the paradoxical experience of ADHD ‘hyperfocus’. Her research is highly collaborative, involving co-authors in Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the United States, as well as over 30 undergraduate trainees, graduate peers, and postdoctoral fellows at the University of Waterloo.
Following completion of her PhD, Samantha looks forward to pursuing postdoctoral research opportunities where she can expand her collaborative network and investigate the neural correlates of retrospective judgments of attention.
Recent publications:
- Ayers-Glassey, S., Pereira, E.J., Wammes, J.D., & Smilek, D. (2025). Retrospective attention: Examining temporally specific retrospective reports of mind wandering and engagement during online video lectures. Psychological Research, 89, 103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-025-02133-0
- Pereira, E.J.*, Ayers-Glassey, S.*, Wammes, J.D., & Smilek, D. (2024). Attention in hindsight: Using stimulated recall to capture dynamic fluctuations in attentional engagement. Behavior Research Methods, 56, 5354-5385. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02273-4 (*Equal contribution)
Serena McDiarmid
Published August 2025
Serena is a PhD student in the Developmental Psychology program, working under the supervision of Dr. Heather Henderson. Serena is a Vanier Scholar, educator and leader with 7+ years of experience in the field. Serena is a trained teacher, receiving her Bachelor of Education at Wilfrid Laurier University. She utilizes these skills as an award-winning sessional instructor (Renison University College and UW’s Psych department), co-developer of the “Wicked Problem of Precarity” course, and in positions with UW’s Centre for Teaching Excellence where she notably developed UW’s Trauma-Informed Teaching workshop.
As a researcher, Serena focuses on mixed-methods, community-based projects that support youth in school and community settings. Her current work focusses on measuring and bolstering youths’ sense of belonging. Previously, her worked has focused on youth with a refugee background and she supported the Horizons 2020 RefugeesWellSchool project through a Mitacs GlobaLink award.
In the community, Serena serves as a Project Coordinator for the Measurement for Change Team, bringing effective measurement skills and tools to community organizations. She also serves on the Board of Directors for Emmanuel Early Learning and Care Centre where she is working to expand access to non-profit Forest and Nature Childcare in Waterloo Region and improve the wages and working conditions of early childhood educators in Ontario.
- Follow Serena on LinkedIn or Google Scholar
- Learn more about the Measurement for Change Team
- View Serena’s submission to the 2024 University of Waterloo GRADflix Competition which earned an Honorable Mention
Khalil Husein
Published August 2025
Khalil is a 1st year PhD student in Cognitive Neuroscience, supervised by Dr. Myra Fernandes. He recently completed his master’s, where he explored the mechanisms behind music’s unique ability to bring back past personal memories. He examined what components of music, the lyrical or the instrumental elements, are important in music’s capacity to cue memory. He studied this across the lifespan, which is especially important in identifying music’s potential in supporting recall in older adults, who often report difficulty remembering past events. Khalil found that, remarkably, music can become an even more potent cue across the lifespan. His work suggests that music’s enhanced cueing ability in older adults originates from its lyrical elements. Khalil is now extending this work to study music’s cueing effectiveness in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.
Working with Dr. Marek Stastna, Khalil has also examined how natural language processing tools can determine the emotionality of memory narratives. He compared the effectiveness of two popular algorithms, VADER and TextBlob, and identified approaches to more fully harness their capabilities.
Khalil has received funding at the provincial (QEII-GSST) and federal levels (NSERC CGS-M; PGS-D) and his work has received recognition from organizations such as the Canadian Psychology Association (CPA) and Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour & Cognitive Sciences (CSBBCS).
Khalil is excited to expand on his work in cued autobiographical memory in his PhD. He is also looking forward to stepping into the role of GASP President and coordinator of the WRAP participant pool. He would like to thank Dr. Fernandes and everyone in the department for creating a constantly supportive community and rewarding learning environment!
Khalil was recently profiled as an emerging researcher on the Network for Aging Research Website.
Sarah English
Published August 2025
Sarah is a 5th-year PhD student in Developmental Psychology, working under the supervision of Dr. Heather Henderson. Her research examines how children navigate the complexities of forming and maintaining friendships, with a focus on how they use affiliative language (i.e., language that expresses a desire to connect and helps foster closeness with peers) to build social connections. Sarah investigates the multiple motivations that shape affiliative behaviour, including temperamental traits, moment-to-moment perceptions of how one is viewed by their peers, and situational factors such as social exclusion. By exploring the subtle role of language in shaping children’s social worlds, her work offers valuable insights into the everyday building blocks of healthy peer relationships. Sarah’s research has been supported by several competitive scholarships, including the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, SSHRC CGS-M, and the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, and has been shared at national and international conferences including the Society for Research in Child Development, the Occasional Temperament Conference, and the Canadian Psychological Association.
Beyond her research, Sarah is deeply committed to fostering community within the department. As a core member of the Psychology EDI Working Group, she is a facilitator for the Lift Psychology Undergraduate Mentorship Program, a lead organizer of the Psychology Discovery Conference, and an advocate for student well-being through the Healthy Labs initiative. As a graduate representative on various departmental and Arts faculty committees, and former Vice President of GASP, Sarah continues to actively advocate for students in discussions around curriculum, hiring, and policy. She is equally passionate about teaching and mentorship, having taught courses in Developmental Psychology and an advanced seminar on the (often overlooked) strengths of shy children.
Sophia Tran
Published August 2025
Sophia is a 4th-year PhD candidate in Cognitive Neuroscience working under the supervision of Dr. Myra Fernandes. She is currently studying how encoding techniques, such as drawing, enhances later recall of to-be-remembered items. She is primarily interested in how the drawing benefit can be modulated by stimulus-driven factors. More specifically, the bulk of her research has focused on delineating which encoding techniques are the most effective at grounding abstract concepts and facilitating higher-quality and higher-level learning. Finally, she has leveraged age-related neurological differences across the human lifespan (children to older adults) to examine the potential mechanisms underlying the drawing benefit.
Sophia has received several competitive awards and recognitions at the provincial, national, and the international level. These include the NSERC CGS-D, Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Canadian Psychological Association’s Student Research Grant. She has presented her work at renowned conferences, including the Psychonomic Society, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science, among others.
Looking forward, she is interested in pursuing her postdoctoral studies.
Madeline Wiseman
Published August 2025
Madeline completed her BSc (Hons.) in psychology at the University of New Brunswick, and her MASc at the University of Waterloo. She is currently working towards her PhD in the Developmental Psychology program, working with Dr. Katherine White. Broadly, her main research interests pertain to language development and the social-cognitive aspects of children’s word learning. The goals of this research are to investigate how children learn language and how their social perceptions of informants affect their learning.