We are very pleased to announce that two of our current undergraduate Research Assistants, Maegan Mitchell and Erin Stadnyk, have been accepted to graduate school to begin September 2018. We are very excited for them and could not be more proud!
Maegan Mitchell
Maegan will be completing a combined MA/PhD program in Developmental Psychology at Concordia University under the supervision of Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein in the Concordia Infant Research Lab. (This makes Maegan an academic “grandchild” of Dr. Janet F. Werker, the Director of our Centre, because Janet supervised Krista’s PhD several years ago!) Maegan will receive her BSc in Behavioural Neuroscience from UBC this Spring. She joined our Centre as a Research Assistant in January 2017 and is currently completing a Directed Studies project under the supervision of our postdoctoral fellow Dr. Rebecca Reh, using electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate oscillatory activity as a signature of neuronal plasticity in 5-month-old infants. Maegan is passionate about living “zero waste” and was an Event Coordinator for UBC Sustainability & Engineering last summer. She is also President of the UBC chapter of SisuGirls, which empowers women through outdoor sports. This summer, before beginning her grad program, Maegan will be traveling solo through Europe!
Erin Stadnyk
Erin will be completing an MSc in Speech-Language Pathology at UBC’s School of Audiology & Speech Sciences, a program for which she received an Entrance Scholarship! Erin has been a Research Assistant with us since November 2015 – making her the most experienced RA on our team – and will receive her BA in Speech Sciences from UBC this Spring. Erin currently works on two language development research projects here at our Centre: one investigates 4- and 8-month-olds’ ability to use cues in a speaker’s face (e.g. head nods, eyebrow movements) to learn the grammatical rules of a new language; the other investigates whether access to audiovisual information when learning new words helps toddlers (24 months old) to retain the words. Erin presented her preliminary findings in the first project at the Language Sciences Undergraduate Research Conference (LSURC) this past January and she won the Best Poster Award! Through UBC’s School of Audiology & Speech Sciences, Erin volunteers with the Advanced Language and Literacy Program of BC, which provides support to young adults with histories of developmental delay and with speech, language, and literacy problems. Erin is an avid rock climber and will be spending this summer in her hometown near the Rockies (Calgary) before beginning her grad program this Fall.
Both Maegan and Erin have been invaluable members of our research team these past several terms and we wish them all the best with this next step of their academic journeys!