Alumni Members
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Allison M. Wilck
BA, State University of New York at Geneseo, 2015
MA, University at Albany, 2018
PHD, University at Albany, 2021
Allison is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Eastern Mennonite University. She continues to collaborate with the Cognition and Language Lab on projects 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 Handbook on Language and Emotion, The Handbook of the Neuroscience of Multilingualism, Evolutionary Psychological Science, and International Journal of Bilingualism. Most recently, she has completed work on the emotional contributions to 'fake news' susceptibility that earned a distinctive dissertation award. Outside of the Lab, Allison was an inaugural member of UAlbany's Center for Undergraduate Research and Creative Engagement (CURCE) to promote student involvement in the research process.
Email: allison.wilck@emu.edu
Stephanie Kazanas
BS, University of Scranton, 2008
MS, Shippensburg University, 2010
MA, University at Albany, 2013
PHD, University at Albany, 2016
Stephanie is an Assistant 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, priming, and creativity. These projects have been presented at conferences, including 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. Stephanie 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, 2002
MA, University at Albany, SUNY, 2004
PHD, University at Albany, SUNY, 2010
Tina is an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), in Rochester, New York (https://rit.edu/cla/psychology/faculty/sutton) and serves as the Program Director for the MS Experimental Psychology Program there. She is also a member of the Multidisciplinary Vision Research Laboratory (MVRL) at RIT and a member of the Language Science initiative. Her research interests include cognition and emotion, attention and emotion, emotion word representation within and across languages, and the science of learning. Her newest project, recently published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (Sutton, Herbert, & Clark, 2019), provides researchers with a large set of facial stimuli rated on valence, arousal, and dominance to complement similar databases for words and images. Her work has been published in Acta Psychologica, Behavior Research Methods, the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, Cognition and Emotion, the Journal of Cognitive Psychology, and the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development.
Email address: tmsgsh@rit.edu
Dana Basnight-Brown
MA, 2004; PHD, 2010
Dana is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Centre for Cognitive and Developmental Research at the United States International University – Africa, located in Nairobi, Kenya. The Center is the first laboratory in Eastern Africa fully devoted to the study of human cognition. Dana also serves as an Associate Director for the Psychological Science Accelerator (PSA), a distributed global laboratory network, currently representing more than 500 laboratories across 70 countries. Dana’s primary research focuses on the cognitive processes surrounding the intersection of language, emotion, and memory, with a particular focus on multilingual communities. While at SUNY-Albany, Dana was the 2008 Recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award, and the 2010 Recipient of the Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award. Dana was also the recipient of the APA Mentor Fellowship for Young Career Scientists (funded by the National Science Foundation), the APA Early Career Achievement Award, and the APA International Psychology Division Early Career Professional Award. She has published numerous articles and chapters within the field and has had the opportunity to present her research in spoken sessions around the world.
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. She occasionally works for Pearson Educational Measurement. 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