ISRA began its New Investigators (NI) Program at the 2008 World Meeting in Budapest to encourage and assist scholars who are getting started or are in the early stages of their aggression research career.

ISRA encourages enrolled doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career researchers within 3 years of their terminal graduate degree to apply for the program.

Awardees receive partial monetary support to attend an ISRA World Meeting and also participate in a tailored program at the World Meeting that typically includes:

  1. A Pre-Conference NI Workshop
    The Workshop brings together NIs and group leaders to engage in didactic and group activities designed to support and facilitate NIs professional development and, ultimately, research-based career trajectories. Activities typically include a focus on manuscript and grant writing, reviewing and evaluating research, strategies for building a research program, and being competitive on the job market. NIs are encouraged to read assigned articles prior to the Workshop and submit their own work (e.g., a manuscript or grant proposal in preparation) to be discussed in the Workshop.

  2. Meeting With Mentors
    NIs meet with a different panel of mentors during lunch or dinner each day for informal discussion. Mentors may include plenary speakers who are available for follow-up questions about their presentations.

  3. Networking
    NIs will meet with senior members of ISRA. They will also have opportunities to interact professionally and socially with other new investigators during and outside of the pre-conference Workshop. Mutual support and fruitful collaborations have developed out of past NI interactions.

    Participants in the NI Program have found it to be an enjoyable and enriching experience.

New Investigators Mentorship Program

Beginning in 2024, the ISRA New Investigators (NI) Program will give NIs an opportunity to participate in a special ISRA Mentorship program.

NIs will have the opportunity to participate in a short internship of 2-3 weeks with a senior ISRA researcher at the mentor’s host university. Potential outcomes of the mentorship program may include the creation of sustainable partnerships and collaborations, the opportunity to develop a symposium for the next ISRA biennial world meeting, the opportunity to write an article for the ISRA Bulletin, and the opportunity to develop a joint research and publication project.

NI members will be eligible to receive substantial financial support from ISRA and/or the host mentor.

 

NEW INVESTIGATORS

2022

Erinn Acland is a postdoctoral fellow at the Development, Prevention Science and Adaptation Lab at University of Montreal and the Youth Suicide Prevention Lab at McGill University. Erinn received her H.B.A. from McGill University and M.A. and Ph.D. from University of Toronto in Psychology. Erinn is interested in understanding the complexities involved in the development of antisocial traits and behaviours. Currently, her research is focused on identifying distinct profiles of antisociality in young people and determining how these profiles relate to unique networks of developmental and biopsychosocial factors.

Alisson P. de Almeida received his B.Sc. from the University of São Paulo in April 2021. He is currently doing his Ph.D. in behavioural neuroscience at the University of São Paulo. His research focus is on the neural bases of social behaviours. Particularly, he is interested in understanding how rodents defend themselves from aggressive conspecifics and the implications of this aggression on the brain and behaviour of defeated animals. To this end, he works with tools for mapping neural circuits, techniques for the functional manipulation of these circuits and methods for monitoring neural activity in freely behaving animals.

Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill, Ph.D., J.D., joined the faculty at Arizona State University as an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice in June 2022. Kwan’s research is centered on social and narrative group identity and its intersection with perceptions and experiences of justice and justice systems. Among other things, he studies violence (e.g., hate crime) and systemic responses to violence through frameworks of intergroup conflict. Kwan obtained a J.D. at Emory University in 2011 and a Ph.D. in criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/City University of New York Graduate Center in 2020. He most recently served as the Director of Research and Data Analytics for the district attorney’s office in Brooklyn, New York, USA, and previously worked, in reverse order, for New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, at John Jay College’s Research and Evaluation Center, and as a police officer and firefighter in Charleston and Cayce, South Carolina, respectively.
View his publications on Google Scholar →
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Ana Bravo completed the Master's Degree in Applied Psychology to Education and Social Well-being at the University of Cordoba (Spain), where she is currently in her third year of her Ph.D. Since 2019, she has had a university teaching training contract, which is one of the most prestigious pre-doctoral grants in Spain. She is a member of the Laboratory of Studies on Convivencia and Violence Prevention. Her research activity is focused on the study of contextual and group characteristics associated with interpersonal relationships, such as peer group, social status, friendship dynamics and their relationship with bullying. Her research has an ecological perspective, where the peer group plays a fundamental role in the perpetuation and maintenance of victimization dynamics. She has been a member of a national research project (ComPeco; PSI2016-74871- R), aimed at the analysis and promotion of social, emotional, and moral competence in adolescents. She is currently a member of a national research project (TOMI, PID2020-113911RB-I00) and another proof of concept project (Moral-Me, PDC2021-121741-I00). The first is aimed at exploring the moral, motivational and group factors that play a key role in decision-making in situations of bullying and the second aims to transfer the research results found to the school reality, with the aim of improving convivencia.
View her publications on ResearchGate →
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Karolina Dyduch-Hazar received her Master’s Degree in Psychology from University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland) and is currently in her final year of her Ph.D. in Psychology at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw (Poland). Her research focuses on the rewarding nature of aggression. She was a Fulbright Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently leading works on the consequences of vengeful pleasure as a part of her project funded by the National Science Center. She is also involved in projects that examine mechanisms of sadism and motives underlying aggressive behavior. In the future, she would like to apply her research into the domain of intergroup violence including terrorism.

Lena Hofhansel received her diploma in psychology from the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She received her Ph.D. from the RWTH Aachen University Hospital and the Jülich Research Center with a thesis on the structure and function of the brain in relation to aggressive behavior. As part of the International Research Training Group 2150, she was granted a research fellowship at the Institute of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania, USA. Currently, she is continuing her work as a Postdoc at the University Hospital RWTH Aachen to investigate neurobiological mechanisms of criminal and aggressive behavior. Her focus lays on the identification of specific neuronal mechanisms that could be targeted by therapeutic approaches aiming to reduce aggressive and criminal behavior.

Gretchen Perhamus received her B.A. from the Pennsylvania State University and is currently a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her research broadly applies a developmental psychopathology framework to examine interactive influences of social, emotional, cognitive, and psychophysiological factors in the development of externalizing problems in youth. She applies advanced statistical methods to disentangle theoretically distinct developmental pathways, and takes a gender-balanced approach to her research by examining how these trajectories vary by gender.

Anna Pham, Ph.D., received her Bachelor of Arts Psychology (Honours) from MacEwan University, Edmonton, Canada, in 2013, and her Masters of Arts Psychology and Ph.D. Experimental Psychology from Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, in 2016 and 2021, respectively. During her Ph.D., the main focus of her research was on the assessment and prediction of intimate partner violence recidivism, as well as sexual and non-sexual violence recidivism. Other research interests included the conceptualization and measurement of cognitions thought to be relevant for sexual aggression, and the identification of factors that may lead to sexual interest in children. Currently, she is a Junior Defence Research and Policy Officer at the Sexual Misconduct Response Centre with the Department of National Defence Canada, where the main focus of her research is to identify factors specific to sexual misconducts within the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), as well as evaluate programs designed to prevent sexual misconducts within the CAF. As this area of research is rather new, she would like to continue this line of research in the near future.

Travis Ray received his M.S. in Psychology from Oakland University. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Oakland University concentrating in social and health psychology. His research focuses on men’s conceptualizations of masculinity and how it relates to violence against women, aggression toward LGBTQ+ individuals, and gun-related constructs (e.g., attitudes; ownership; storage practices). Travis is also interested in emotional components of prejudice and aggression, such as disgust and emotion regulation difficulties. In the Fall of 2022, Travis will begin working as a Research Psychologist at the Naval Health Research Center, where his research will focus on sexual aggression and family violence within military contexts.

Elizabeth Summerell is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of New South Wales. She received her Bachelor of Psychology (Hons) and Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, under the mentorship of Eddie and Cindy Harmon-Jones. Her doctoral research focused on examining the efficacy of cognitive broadening and humility as novel mechanisms for the reduction of anger. Her current work investigates the brain mechanisms involved in alcohol-related aggression. In one stream of research, she uses fMRI to identify brain networks implicated in reactive aggression and anger regulation when intoxicated versus sober. In another stream of research, she uses tDCS to investigate the effects of brain stimulation on ameliorating alcohol-related aggression via improved emotion regulation. Elizabeth plans to continue investigating discrete emotions and their regulation, and pursue a career in academia.  
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  • Joanne Beames (University of New South Wales, Australia)

    Massil Benbouriche (Wayne State University, USA)

    Ashlee Curtis (Deakin University, Odyssey House Victoria, Australia)

    Gabriela Gan (Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, Germany)

    Alexis Garcia (Florida International University, USA)

    Gadi Gilam (Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center; Tel-Aviv University, Israel; Stanford University, USA)

    Elizabeth “Beth” Green (University of Oklahoma, USA)

    Patrick Green (Duke University, USA)

    Marlene Krauch (University of Heidelberg, Germany)

    Ruschelle Leone (Georgia State University, USA)

    Eva Mishor (Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel)

    Kristin Perry (University at Buffalo, USA)

    Danique Smeijers (Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

    Jean Von Hohendorff (IMED Passo Fundo, Brazil)

    Nick Wagner (University of Maryland, USA)

    See Abstracts of Research Presented by the 2016 NI Group at the ISRA Meeting (PDF) →

  • Laszlo Biro (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)

    Khandis Blake (University of New South Wales, Australia)

    Irene Camerlink (Scotland’s Rural College, UK)

    Chen Chen (Institute of Forensic Science, China)

    David Chester (University of Kentucky, USA)

    Hailey Holmgren (Brigham Young University, USA)

    Nathan Kolla (University of Toronto, Canada)

    Antonio Mendoza Diaz (University of Sydney, Australia)

    Tim Schofield (Australian National University, Australia)

    Svenja Senkans (Swinburne University and Forensicare, Australia)

    Ian Stanley (Florida State University, USA)

    Imdadul Haque Talukdar (Åbo Akademi University, Finland)

    Stacy Tzoumakis (University of New South Wales, Australia)

    See Abstracts of Research Presented by the 2016 NI Group at the ISRA Meeting (PDF)

  • Emily Edwards (CUNY John Jay College, USA)

    Shawn Geniol (Brock University, Canada)

    Ryan Harrod (University of Alaska Anchorage, USA)

    Zurika Odendaal (University of the Free State, South Africa)

    Richard Pond (University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA)

    Grace Skrzypiec (Flinders University, Australia)

    Patrik Söderberg (Åbo Akademi University, Finland)

    Laura Stockdale (Loyola University Chicago, USA)

    Paulina Tomaszewska (University of Potsdam, Germany)

    Irene Vitoroulis (University of Ottawa, Canada)

    Weijun Wang (University of Ottawa, Canada)

    Jiansong Zhou (Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, China)

  • Paul Adachi (Brock University, Canada)

    Gareth Arnott (Queen's University-Belfast, UK)

    Franziska Dambacher (Maastricht University, The Netherlands)

    Emma Fabiansson (University of New South Wales, Australia)

    Youssef Hasan (University of Pierre Mendes-France, France)

    Ada Johansson (Abo Akademi University, Finland)

    Nadja Laubscher (University of the Free State, South Africa)

    Jill Lobbestael (Maastricht University, The Netherlands)

    Maria Noel Meikle (Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas Clemente Estable, Uruguay)

    Ingrid Obsuth (University of Cambridge, UK)

    Aron Tulogdi (Institute of Experimental Medicine, Hungary)

  • Daniel Antonius (New York University School of Medicine, USA)

    Katja Bertsch (Heidelberg University, Germany)

    Justin Carre (Duke University, USA)

    Violet Cheung (University of San Francisco, USA)

    Jennifer Fanning (University of Southern Mississippi, USA)

    Coreen Farris (University of Pittsburgh, USA)

    Kate Gallagher (Georgia State University, USA)

    Kevin Swartout (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA)

    NIcole Warehime (Oklahoma Baptist University, USA)

    Evrfim Cetinkaya Yildiz (Middle East Technical University, Turkey)

  • Catalina Cervantes (University of Texas – Austin, USA)

    Nathan Dewall (University of Kentucky, USA)

    Whitney Heppner (University of Georgia, USA)

    Amanda Murray (University of Iowa, USA)

    Starr Sage (University of Minnesota, USA)

    Dominic Parrott (Georgia State University, USA)

    Maren Strenziok (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, USA)

    Andra Teten (Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, Houston, TX, USA)