The Department of Psychology is delighted by the arrival of three new faculty members, Professors Amanda Uliaszek, Andy Lee and Rutsuko Ito. All three will gladly consider applications from students interested in doing supervised research in the context of PSY/NRO C90/93 and PSY/NRO D98. If you are interested in doing volunteer work to help their research, you can also contact them. Please use email and send your transcript copied and pasted from ROSI.

Professor Amanda Uliaszek's research examines the role of personality traits in explaining psychopathological phenomena. This includes how normal personality is related to Axis II symptomatology, the structure of comorbidity, and stress generation in depression and anxiety disorders. She has a specific interest in personality disorders and their developmental course over the lifespan, beginning in late childhood. A secondary line of research involves effectiveness trials of dialectical behavior therapy with suicidal and multi-problem teens. This includes studying the outcome of individual and group DBT within this population, as well as dissemination and implementation of DBT. auliaszek@utsc.utoronto.ca

Dr. Rutsuko Ito's research focuses on investigating the neural and neurochemical systems in the brain that underlie reward-, or fear-related learning using animal models. The ultimate goal of her research is twofold; first, to gain a better understanding of how the mammalian brain is organised to optimize the processing (acquisition and recall) of emotional and contextual information, and the impact such information has on motivation and behaviour, and second, to establish how, and what aspect of these processes go awry in psychological diseases such as addiction and schizophrenia and phobias. rito@utsc.utoronto.ca