Profiles

Dr. Bessma Momani is Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo. She is also a Senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance and Innovation (CIGI), and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C. She was a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at both the Brookings Institution and Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, and formerly a visiting scholar at Georgetown University's Mortara Center.

Dr. Daniel Smilek received his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2002 and then completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia before joining the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo as a faculty member. Smilek has published over 150 peer-reviewed journal articles on various topics in the area of human cognitive neuroscience. His work has been published in some of the top journals in his field including Nature, Psychological Science, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. He is a co-author of an undergraduate textbook on human cognition. Smilek is frequently involved in knowledge mobilization to the transportation industry with the aim of helping frontline workers reduce attention-related errors in safety critical settings. 

Dr. Evan Risko is currently an associate professor and a Canada Research Chair in Embodied and Embedded Cognition in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo. Since receiving his PhD at the University of Waterloo, he has been pursuing his research interests in issues related to the embodied and embedded nature of cognition and the utilization of cognitive psychology to help improve practices in education and training. 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 including Early Career awards from the Psychonomic Society, the Province of Ontario, and the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science.

Katherine White, PhD joined the Psychology Department at the University of Waterloo in 2010, after completing her PhD in Cognitive Science at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island, USA) and postdoctoral research in the department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester (Rochester, New York, USA). She studies the earliest stages of language development in infants and toddlers. 

Dr. Neil Randall is an associate professor with the Department of English Language and literature with a doctorate from York University. He is the chair of the Council for Responsible Innovation and Technology and the executive director of The Games Institute, whose research focuses on games studies, interactive immersive media and technology, rhetoric and semiotics of human-computer interaction and the practice and analysis of professional writing. Randall was the principal investigator for the SSHRC Partnership Grant that funded the games research network IMMERSe (The Interactive and Multi-Modal Research Syndicate) and is a distinguished computer book and magazine writer. 

When Mr. Nguyen was a third-year undergraduate in chemical engineering at Berkeley, he had to take two half courses of introductory economics as a breadth degree requirement. It was an eye-opening experience as he found that economics was not very much different from engineering in terms of the required discipline and problem-solving skills. Mr. Nguyen got hooked in economics and started taking extra economics credits along with his engineering courses. Went on to do well in engineering but after graduation, went to Simon Fraser for a qualifying term before getting into the MA Economics program. He learned that modern economics requires analytical skills as much as mathematics, and again started taking extra math credits along the MA program. After graduation, Mr. Nguyen went to Western for graduate study in mathematics for two years before switching back to economics for good (enough running around).