About Me
I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.
Before moving to St. Catharines, I spent two years as a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dr. John. E. Lydon at McGill University in Montreal, Québec.
I completed a Ph.D in Social Psychology at the University of Toronto in 2017, working under the supervision of Dr. Penelope Lockwood.
I am also a self-taught programmer. While completing my PhD, I collaborated with Dr. Elizabeth Page-Gould
to develop ExperienceSampler, an open-source scaffold for building experience sampling smartphone apps.
I will be accepting graduate students for Fall 2019. Click here to learn more about the Psychology Graduate Program at Brock.
Although I'm technologically savvy, I enjoy putting pen to paper and can often be found scribbling away in a notebook or on scrap paper.
When I'm not working, I enjoy spending time in the kitchen trying new recipes and making baked goods, especially bread.
I also enjoy a good cup of coffee, especially a flat white on a crisp fall day, and listening to podcasts.
My guilty pleasure is watching bad reality TV and competitive cooking shows, but I also enjoy watching good dramas, fun sitcoms, and my home team, the Toronto Blue Jays, play ball.
Research Interests
You're on your phone and you open up Facebook. Within a few scrolls, you find out that your friend's boyfriend has proposed to her
in the most romantic way you've ever seen while on vacation in Paris. In contrast, you have to tiptoe around the idea of moving in together when you talk to your partner of 5 years.
How do you feel about your own relationship? How do you feel about your partner?
At a social event, you run into your friend who has a child around the same age as yours. As you're chatting with your friend, she tells
you about all her child's accomplishments, and all you can think about is how your child is falling behind in comparison.
How does this affect how you see your child? How does this affect your relationship with your child?
Now more than ever before, we are bombarded by information about other people in our daily life,
providing us with countless opportunities to compare ourselves, the people around us (including our close
others such as family members, friends, and romantic partners), and our relationships. How do these comparisons affect
our relationships? How do they change the way we see ourselves and the important people in our lives?
My program of research explores the impact of these comparisons in the context of close relationships. Specifically, I examine how
comparisons between close others influence relationship outcomes (e.g., I compare myself to my romantic partner),
how comparisons between relationships influence how individuals perceive their own relationship, and how comparisons between close others and another person
(e.g, comparing my child to someone else's child or comparing my partner to someone else's partner)
influence how individuals perceive the close other (e.g., romantic partner, parents, children, and close friends) and their
relationships with these close others. I examine
these comparisons by taking a multi-method approach by combining experimental, experience sampling, and dyadic methods. Consequently,
I implement a variety of statistical techniques, including multilevel modeling, generalized linear modeling, bootstrapping, and dyadic analyses.