Colin Ellard

Lab director

Navigation in real and virtual environments

Picture of Colin Ellard
Colin Ellard is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and the director of its Urban Realities Laboratory, where he studies wayfinding, cognition, and emotion in the built environment. He has published peer-reviewed articles in visual perception, environmental psychology, cognitive mapping, virtual reality and neuroscience in North America and Europe and has presented his work to international audiences at conferences in the areas of cognitive science, neuroscience, environmental graphic design, architecture, and planning. He consults and collaborates regularly with architects, designers, planners, and artists both in Canada and abroad. Ellard provides a popular account of his work in his books Places of the Heart (2015) and You Are Here (2009),which garnered strong praise from the New York Times, PBS, Scientific American, New Scientist and many other print and broadcast media outlets. 

Colin Ellard's profile​ on University of Waterloo Psychology website


Contact Information

Office: Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology building (PAS) 4036

Email: cellard@uwaterloo.ca