Alumni Members
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Dr. Allison M. Wilck, Ph.D.
BA, State University of New York at Geneseo, 2015
MA, University at Albany, 2018
PHD, University at Albany, 2021
Allison currently uses her expertise in cognitive psychology in a variety of professional roles. After serving as Program Director for the Psychology Department at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, VA for two years and earning the 2024 Excellence in Teaching Award, she joined the city's public school as the Student Accessibility and Assistive Technology Specialist to apply her knowledge completing educational evaluations with the special education department. She continues to teach upper level research courses with the university and collaborate in research projects. Current research directions include (1) secondary school teacher's perceptions of and interactions regarding student gender identity and (2) the neurological (EEG) underpinnings of young adult political biases. Dr. Wilck is also co-author on an upcoming open-access Cognitive Psychology textbook and has publications that explore the adaptive value of human memory and learning efficacy from a variety of angles including cognitive limitations, social perspectives, and emotional contributions. Her findings are discussed in a variety of handbooks and data-driven journals including Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Advances in Understanding Adaptive Memory, Handbook on Language and Emotion, The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism, Evolutionary Psychological Science, and International Journal of Bilingualism. During her time at UAlbany, Allison was an inaugural member of UAlbany's Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Engagement (CURCE) to promote student involvement in the research process, and she earned a 2020-2021 Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award and 2020 Keyser Teaching Excellence Award.
Email: amwilck@yahoo.com
Stephanie A. Kazanas
BS, University of Scranton, 2008
MS, Shippensburg University, 2010
MA, University at Albany, 2013
PHD, University at Albany, 2016
Stephanie is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Tennessee Technological University and Director of their Cognition Laboratory. Her research interests include emotion word and face processing, adaptive memory, bilingualism/multilingualism, and creativity. These projects have been presented at meetings of the Association for Psychological Science, the Psychonomic Society, the International Symposium on Bilingualism, and the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Her work has been published in numerous scientific journals, including the American Journal of Psychology, the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Language and Speech, and Evolutionary Psychological Science. She regularly engages students in her writing projects, co-authoring entries in Springer's Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, Encyclopedia of Sexual Psychology and Behavior, and Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior. At Tech, Stephanie teaches courses in Learning & Cognition, Experimental Psychology, Critical Thinking, and Evolutionary Psychology, while also mentoring Senior Thesis, Master's Thesis, and Dissertation projects. She has also received awards for her teaching, including UAlbany's President's Award for Excellence in Teaching and Tech's EDGE Creative Inquiry Curriculum Grant.
Email address: skazanas@tntech.edu
Faye Knickerbocker
BA, 2006
MA 2008, 2011
PhD, 2014
Faye’s primary research interests are the processing and storage of emotion and emotion-laden concepts, the embodied account for semantic representation, and bilingual language processing. Her doctoral work involving proactive interference (PI) and emotion processing is currently under review with the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. She is currently conducting research on the influence of emotion on eye movements while reading (with an article at Cognition & Emotion and a second submitted for review), and the semantic and affective links between emotion and emotion-laden words using an affective priming paradigm. Faye has also published in Visual Cognition, the online blog for Cambridge Extra at the Linguist List (the linguistics blog of Cambridge University Press), and in two academic texts. Faye is currently a Teaching Assistant Professor at East Carolina University. She is developing research relationships in an applied setting in Cognitive-Developmental Psychology.
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Email address: fayeknickerbocker@gmail.com
Jennifer L. Gianico
MA, 2003; PHD, 2010
Jen is an Assistant Professor at St. Andrews University (a branch of Webber International University) in Laurinburg, North Carolina. She teaches courses across the Psychology curriculum, including Introduction to Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Learning and Motivation, Psychology in Legal Contexts, and Drugs and Human Behavior. While a Psychology Laboratory facility has been a part of the St. Andrew's campus for decades, Jen has recently christened the Cognition Affect Language and Memory (CALM) Laboratory, and she is focused on engaging undergraduates in research. Jen's research interests include, language processing (especially in terms of ambiguous words and sentences), the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, and emotion's effect on memory. She has previously held visiting assistant professor positions at schools in Florida and New York.
Email address: gianicojl@sa.edu
Tina M. (Canary) Sutton
BS, Union College
MS and PhD, State University of New York at Albany
Dr. Tina Sutton is a Cognitive Psychologist and director of the Attention, Cognition, and Emotion (ACE) Lab in the Department of Psychology at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Her research focuses on the interplay between cognition and emotion, the impact of emotion on attention, and the science of learning. Recent publications have appeared in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Teaching of Psychology.
Email address: tmsgsh@rit.edu
Dana Basnight-Brown
BS & BA (Houghton College, 2001)
MA (University at Albany, 2004)
PhD (University at Albany, 2010)
MS (Johns Hopkins University, 2023)
Dana is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the United States International University – Africa (USIU), located in Nairobi, Kenya. During her time at USIU, she started the first laboratory in Eastern Africa fully devoted to the study of human cognition. Dana is also a founding board member and former Associate Director of the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA), one of the largest team science initiatives in the behavior sciences worldwide. Currently, Dana also serves as an Associate Editor at Memory and Cognition and works with several NGOs within the Nairobi area, helping to build their research programs. Dana’s primary research focuses on the cognitive processes surrounding the intersection of language, emotion, and memory, with a particular focus on multilingual communities. Over the years, Dana received various professional awards from the APA, National Science Foundation, and University at Albany, SUNY. Most recently, she was the recipient of the 2023 UAlbany Alumni Excellence in Education Award.
Website (click)
Email address: dana.basnightbrown@gmail.com
Lisa M. Bauer
MA, 1997; PHD, 2003
While at the University at Albany, Lisa focused on an examination of the cognitive aspects of emotion, including the characteristics of emotion concepts, false memory for emotion, eyewitness memory, and the cross-cultural expression of emotional information. She taught at Utica College before accepting a position as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at Pepperdine University, California. At Pepperdine, she was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. Lisa then joined the faculty at Mizzou as an Assistant Teaching Professor, in the Department of Psychology, where she has taught and mentored both undergraduate and graduate students. She teaches an introductory psychology class, research methods classes and courses focusing on various aspects of cognitive psychology. In 2017, Lisa was honored with an Excellence in Education Award from the University of Missouri recognizing educators who contribute to student learning and personal development through out-of-the-classroom experiences. In 2018, she was promoted to Associate Teaching Professor. Recently, she earned special recognition with a Gold Chalk Award for excellence in teaching and mentoring graduate students. Lisa resides in Columbia, Missouri with her husband, Dr. Jeffrey Johnson, also a faculty member at Mizzou, and their daughter.
Kristen A. Diliberto-Macaluso
MA, 1996; PHD, 1999
After completing her doctorate, Kristen accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Psychology at Berry College, GA, where she was tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2005. Kristen served as Chair of the Department of Psychology at Berry College from 2007-2012. Currently, she is the Coordinator of the Ralph George Scholar program, a competitive research grant program that funds student research with faculty. In Spring 2017, Kristen was promoted to the rank of full professor. She enjoys teaching courses in the Introduction to Psychology, Research Methods and Statistics I and II, Cognitive Psychology, Learning, Research Seminar in Cognitive Psychology, and Eyewitness Memory. Her research interests are in the areas of implicit memory, emotion, false memory, social cognition, and pedagogy. Kristen's most recent publication, "The Use of Mobile Apps to Enhance Student Learning in Introduction to Psychology" appeared in the APA journal, Teaching of Psychology. In Spring 2018, she gave an invited workshop at STP-APS annual meeting in San Francisco based on the aforementioned work. She lives in Kennesaw, GA, with her husband and two daughters.
Email address: kdiliberto@berry.edu
Cheryl D. Muldoon
MA, 1997; PHD, 1999
After completing her doctorate, Cheryl accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Research and Statistics at Springfield College in Springfield, Massachusetts. She has since held positions in the analytics devisions at Yankelovich Partners, Harris Interactive, and Nielson. She is currently a Director of Analytics at The Harris Poll (Harris Insights & Analytics), focusing on the design and analysis of projects concerning decision making and choice behavior.
Email address: cheryl.muldoon@harrisinsights.com
Katherine M. Mathis
MA, 1995; PHD, 1998
Kathy was the first graduate of the Cognition and Language Laboratory. She has had positions at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and is currently teaching at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Her research interests are in the areas of object perception, object and scene recognition, bilingual memory representation, the effects of implicit processing on preferences, and the automaticity of lexical and semantic processing.
Email address: kmathis@bates.edu