Speakers

Wesley is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Trent University, joining the university in 2016 after a postdoctoral fellowship with Health Canada. His research area is broadly applied statistics, with emphases in time series analysis, spectrum estimation, forensic statistics and cognitive science, as well as the pedagogy and practice of teaching statistics. He is the president-elect of the Statistical Society of Canada's Statistics Education Section and was a contributing author on the International Data Science in Schools curriculum project.

Shawna was appointed Seton Hall’s Vice President of Student Services in October 2019. She earned a doctoral degree of education from Boston University, master of education degree from National Louis University and bachelor of science degree from the University of Illinois. As the VP of Student Services, Cooper-Gibson serves as a member of the Executive Cabinet and provides critical leadership and guidance to facilitate decision making in all matters relating to student welfare. Cooper-Gibson currently oversees a wide array of student support and academic programs, and serves as the co-chair of the Council for Student Success, the University Diversity & Inclusion Committee, and the Health Intervention and Communication Team.

Alyssa received her PhD from the Quantitative Methods area in Psychology at York University in 2017. In 2018, she joined Ryerson's Department of Psychology as an Assistant Professor in the Psychological Science stream. Alyssa is the director of the Research Methods and Statistics (RMaS) lab, researching topics such as: statistical attitudes and anxiety, statistical literacy, and examining how students and researchers build competence with statistical software. Alyssa has taught statistics courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level, but she has been teaching exclusively graduate-level statistics courses in Psychology since 2018.

Alex Cramer is a graduate from the University of Windsor’s history department, and is currently completing his Master’s degree in History at York University. Topics of interest include Caribbean history and US presidents.

Dr. Ken Cramer is a full professor of psychology at the University of Windsor. He specializes in ‘big data’ analysis on topics ranging from education, health, politics, and wellbeing. Together with his co-authors (Alex Cramer & Rebecca Pschibul), they have published extensively, with papers on topics that include a comparison of models of happiness around the world, students’ time usage during Fall Reading Week, and a cluster analysis of US presidential profiles.

Rob is a Professor within the Quantitative Methods program of the Department of Psychology at York University. He is also the Associate Undergraduate Program Director for the Department of Psychology. He has taught statistics to Psychology students for 25 years. His work centers around robust strategies for data analysis, including robust statistics, alternative hypothesis testing strategies (e.g., equivalence testing), multiplicity control, etc.

Geoff is author and co-author of two statistics textbooks published by Routledge. He has taught statistics for more than 50 years, and his statistics tutorial articles and videos have been downloaded or viewed more than 500,000 times. The Association for Psychological Science published six videos of his highly successful workshop on estimation and meta-analysis (the new statistics): tiny.cc/apsworkshop His main research interests are the investigation of statistical understanding, and promotion of Open Science and improved statistical practices. A Rhodes Scholar, he received his Doctorate degree in experimental psychology from Oxford University.

Geoff’s La Trobe University profile: tiny.cc/geoffltuprofile

Psychological Science tutorial article on the new statistics: tiny.cc/tnswhyhow

Textbook information and blog: www.thenewstatistics.com

Lisa is the Walter Crowell University Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Psychology at Wesleyan University. She is an addictive behaviors researcher and the PI on the NSF-funded Passion-Driven Statistics Project.

Linda, MA, is a PhD student in the Quantitative Methods area within the Department of Psychology at York University, Canada. Her research interests include teaching undergraduate statistics, equivalence testing, and statistical artifacts.

Melissa is a PhD Student at York University in the Clinical Developmental Psychology program. Her interest in teaching statistics stems from 5 years of working as a teaching assistant for introductory statistics courses at York University.

Andy is Professor of Quantitative Methods at the University of Sussex. He has published widely (100+ research papers, 29 book chapters, and 17 books in various editions) in the areas of child anxiety and psychological methods and statistics. His current research interests focus on anxiety, the use of statistical methods in psychology, and barriers to learning mathematics and statistics. He is internationally known as a statistics educator. He has written several widely used statistics textbooks including Discovering Statistics Using IBM SPSS Statistics (winner of the 2007 British Psychological Society book award), Discovering Statistics Using R, and An adventure in statistics (shortlisted for the British Psychological Society book award, 2017; British Book Design and Production Awards, primary, secondary and tertiary education category, 2016; and the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers Award for innovation in publishing, 2016), which teaches statistics through a fictional narrative and uses graphic novel elements. He has also written the adventr and discovr packages for the statistics software R that teach statistics and R through interactive tutorials. His uncontrollable enthusiasm for teaching Statistics to psychologists has led to teaching awards from the University of Sussex (2001, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020), the British Psychological Society (2006) and a prestigious UK National Teaching fellowship (2010). He's done the usual academic things: had grants, been on editorial boards, done lots of administration/service but he finds it tedious trying to remember and list this stuff. None of them matter anyway because in the unlikely event that you've ever heard of him it'll be as the "Stats book guy". He spends his non-existent spare time indulging his fantasy existence as a heavy metal drummer or guitarist and walking his cocker spaniel, both of which he finds therapeutic.

Jessica is an assistant professor in the Quantitative Psychology area of the Department of Psychology at McGill University. Her research focuses on developing best practices for latent variables models and psychological measurement. She has been teaching methods and statistics courses for nearly a decade, ranging from large introductory courses to smaller advanced courses. She has written on students’ motivation in STEM and the importance of methodological training for addressing issues of replication and rigour in psychology.

Kristin is an Instructor in the Department of Psychological Science at Valdosta State University. She supports partners in adapting the Passion-Driven Statistics to their course, runs workshops at partner institutions, coordinates dissemination efforts, and translates materials for software platforms as she helps coordinate with 70+ PDS project partners.

Kelly is a Professor of Psychology at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, US. She is a Fellow of the Eastern Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Psychonomics Society. She has taught statistics at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and is currently a member of the 2021 Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP) Presidential Task Force on Statistical Literacy. `

Christopher never decided what he wanted to be when he grew up. Although he’s nominally a professor of psychology at York University now, he started off in music, then psychology, then technical theater, then computational cognitive science, then philosophy of science, then history of science, then statistics. Some people call him the stats cowboy. Some call him the gangster of dataviz. He is the author of Psychology and Its Cities (Routledge, 2019), the editor of Psychology Gets in the Game (w/ Ludy Benjamin, U. Nebraska, 2009), the producer-host of the ongoing video podcast series The History of Psychology Show, and likes to play around with sabermetric analysis in his spare time.

Kristel is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Thiel College where she is the primary advisor for undergraduate students specializing in social psychology. Dr. Gallagher oversees the statistics and research methods course sequence for all psychology majors and minors, having incorporated Passion-Driven Statistics into the curriculum since 2015.

Jessica is an associate professor in Gannon University’s Department of Psychology and Counseling. She has published numerous articles, book chapters, and blog posts (http://notawfulandboring.blogspot.com/) about teaching introduction to statistics in a way that accessible to undergraduates. She is currently serving as the Chair of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology’s Task Force on Statistical Literacy, Reasoning, and Thinking: Guidelines 2.0.

Andrea earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Science at the University of Alberta in 2010. She completed postdoctoral work in quantitative psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before coming to Carleton in 2013. Andrea’s research program focuses on promoting well-being and mental health in adolescence and the transition to adulthood. The unique challenges of the transition to university figure prominently in her work. In teaching, Andrea primarily delivers statistics courses for students in the psychology graduate program, including an online course in structural equation modeling that launched in 2016. Currently, Andrea is the Chair of the Quantitative Methods Section of the Canadian Psychological Association.

Marianne is a Professor of Psychology at Seton Hall University where she has been teaching since 2006. She received her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Binghamton University and specializes in research on memory errors. For the past year, she has been hosting the AskPsychSessions podcast, which creates short episodes aimed on speaking to experts on how to be more effective teachers of psychology. Many of these episodes have focused on various aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion and have influenced how she teaches her own statistics and research methods courses.

Tim has had an atypical career, to say the least. After (barely) obtaining a bachelors degree in Mathematics from the University of Waterloo he worked in the private sector for 7 years. This is a polite way of saying he was a truck driver due, in no small part, to his less than stellar transcript (including an 18% in a statistics course). Tim returned to University in his 30's and earned a second bachelors and M.A. from Brock University and a Ph.D. from Waterloo (all in Psychology). During this time, he began teaching a second-year introductory statistics course and has been continuously instructing this course for 25 years. He has also occasionally taught statistics and research design courses at the third year and graduate levels. Despite teaching relatively large enrolment courses (over 300 students), he works to maintain an informal feel to his course through various techniques such as his "stats improv".

Susan is a Professor of Psychology at Seton Hall. She is the 2021 President of STP and a former President of the Eastern Psychological Association (EPA). Susan is a Fellow of EPA, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science. She has taught statistics at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She was a 2015-2016 U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and she co-authors introductory psychology and statistics textbooks, the latter with Kelly Goerdert.

Marlena is a PhD Student at Ryerson University. Under Dr. Maureen Reed’s supervision, Marlena is completing her dissertation on math phobia and the teaching of statistics. Her goal is to understand how promoting resourcefulness using course content and pedagogical practices might reduce students’ fear of math and lead to better course outcomes. Marlena has been a long-time teaching assistant for undergraduate statistics and has also taught undergraduate statistics at Ryerson University as a course instructor.

Rebecca Pschibul completed her undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Windsor before completing her Master’s degree in counselling at Western. She presently works at a counselling centre in London Ontario.

Maureen is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at Ryerson University. Much of her research focuses on undergraduate student success and resourcefulness; especially for non-traditional students. Maureen has taught undergraduate statistics courses for more than three decades. She is inspired by the confidence gained in students as they navigate through statistics courses.

Michael is an Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Quantitative Methods in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science at York University. He completed his B. Math and M. Sc. in statistics at Carleton University and his Ph.D. in biostatistics at the University of Western Ontario. In addition to a variety of collaborative projects, his primary research area is in respondent-driven sampling with applications to urban Indigenous health. These projects include co-leading a CIHR-funded research program to estimate rates of COVID-19 in urban Indigenous communities and refining meta-analysis methods for studies using respondent-driven sampling.

Dr. Mel Rutherford, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, at McMaster University. His current research deals with social perception and the impact of social categorization on social perception. A longitudinal study in his lab uses infant social attention to predict which children are developing with autism. His research has been covered in The Globe and Mail, The London Times, The Chicago Times, CBC Radio, Quirks and Quarks, The Discovery Channel and more. He is constantly tinkering with his undergraduate inferential statistics course and is not afraid to disrupt pedagogical expectations.

Dr. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers is a mathematical psychologist and a dedicated Bayesian. He works for the Psychological Methods unit at the University of Amsterdam where he heads a lab that develops the JASP open-source software program for statistical analyses (www.jasp-stats.org). Dr. Wagenmakers is also a strong advocate of Open Science and the preregistration of analysis plans. For more information see www.ejwagenmakers.com.

I primarily teach statistics and methodology-based courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels for the Department of Psychology at Carleton University. I have spent considerable time and energy learning about different teaching methodologies, techniques, and technology to incorporate into the classroom and into course evaluation elements. My research interests focus broadly on the concept of well-being and how it can be improved within non-clinical populations. I have previously explored personality, social interactions, and cognitive processes with the majority of my research examining the concept of acting out of character (formally termed counterdispositional behaviour). More recently, my research has shifted and integrated with my teaching. The concepts of grit, persistence, and mental toughness fascinate me. Specifically, how university courses can be designed for students to learn and enhance these psychological concepts in hopes of allowing students to flourish and realize their full potential.

Dr. Bethany White (PhD in Statistics-Biostatistics & MMATH in Statistics, both from the University of Waterloo, and BScH in Mathematics and Statistics from Acadia University) is the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in Statistics and an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, in the Department of Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto. Her research interests involve the impact of technology-enhanced and simulation activities on student learning and attitudes toward statistics. She also has a pedagogical interest in the quantitative training of life sciences students. She served on the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) Statistical Education Section Executive Committee between 2013-2016 (President of the Section for 2014-2015) and is currently on the SSC Board of Directors, and has served on the editorial boards of a couple of statistics education journals and on organizing committees for statistics and science education workshops and conferences in Canada and the US.

As a graduate student, Justeena honed her long-standing interest in post-secondary teaching and learning at the Teaching Commons at York University. There she completed advanced teaching training programs and mentored graduate students and instructors with respect to improving their teaching techniques. In the Psychology Department at York University, Justeena was recommended to teach a second-year undergraduate statistics course as a graduate student instructor. Inspired by her pedagogical training, she pioneered the flipped classroom structure and continues to share and advise the rest of her colleagues in the department on up-to-date educational technology and teaching practices. She is currently completing her Ph.D. training and hopes to pursue a post-secondary teaching career.

Jordana DeSouza is an undergraduate student at York University, completing a Specialized Honours BA in Psychology, with a Concentration in Applied Methods and Analysis. Upon graduation, she plans to pursue a master’s in Quantitative Methods.

Aarzoo Amin Nathani is an international student, passionate about statistics and want to work as a statistician one day. She has a taken multiple stats courses at Trent and wants to learn more!"

Maire O'Hagan is a first year MA Psychology (Psychological Science Stream) student at Ryerson University working under the supervision of Dr. Tara Burke. Broadly, she is interested in evidence-based approaches to police practices and factors that lead to wrongful convictions. Her thesis will examine perceptions and evaluations of suspect alibis across the investigative timeline, and why alibis play such a significant role in wrongful convictions.

Elias Trivett is going into his fourth year of his undergrad in Business Ethics and Psychology. He works in the Trent University Residences and is an eager advocate for students’ success. Elias has taken several statistics classes and is excited to talk about his and his peers’ experience in the classroom.