Research & Innovation

The Social Health Lab

Research Excellence

A sleep tracking app developed by Dr. Frances Chen‘s Social Health Lab won the Healthy Behaviour Data Challenge for its contribution to public health research. Through the app, the Social Health Lab asks how can the monitoring of health outcomes, such as sleep quality, be measured through smartphones and social media—technologies that play a prominent role in our daily lives.

Dr. Kalina Christoff was named a 2017/18 Wall Scholar by the Peter Wall Institute. This support allowed Dr. Christoff to spend one year in residence at the Peter Wall Institute in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.

Dr. Kiley Hamlin received a 2018 Stanton Award for young scholars from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. This award recognizes budding scholars who are making significant contributions to interdisciplinary research and the philosophy and psychology community as a whole.

Dr. David Klonsky received a 2017 UBC Killam Research Fellowship. The fellowship provides him with a full-time study leave to continue his work to advance and disseminate his Three-Step Theory (3ST), a new model of suicide that is evidence-based, easy to understand, and positioned within the ideation-to-action framework.

Dr. Joelle LeMoult was named a 2017 Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science. The Rising Star designation recognizes outstanding early career psychological scientists whose work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions.

Dr. Kristin Laurin was awarded the 2018 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions by the Association of Psychological Science. This award spotlights creative and promising psychology investigators who are working to drive the future of psychological research.

Dr. Ara Norenzayan, Dr. Azim Shariff, and colleagues have received the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize for their paper The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions, a theory of the origins and rise of prosocial religions and the cultural evolution of these religious beliefs. The 2017 prize was also awarded to Will Gervais, Joseph Henrich, Rita McNamara, Edward Slingerland, and Aiyana Willard, co-authors of the article.

Dr. Kiran Soma was awarded a 2017-18 James McKeen Cattell Fellowship. This annual fellowship awards recipients with an extended sabbatical period, allowing researchers to advance their one semester research period to a full year. Soma plans to expand his expertise on steroid profiling through mass spectrometry, an emerging and high-impact analytical approach in the area of behavioural neuroscience.