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.

Visit the New Investigators Corner
 

NEW INVESTIGATORS

2026

Kamilla Bonnesen (University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)
Kamilla Bonnesen, Ph.D., M.P.H., is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Brain and Behaviour Lab of Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt at the University of Ottawa. She holds a doctorate in psychology and a Master of Public Health from Georgia State University, and an honours Bachelor of Science from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Kamilla studies how structural factors and policy shape health and aggression across youth and young adults. Her research spans campus climate and online-based aggression, and traces developmental trajectories linking adolescence to early adulthood.

Nozomi Yamamoto (The University of Osaka, Osaka, Japan)
Nozomi Yamamoto, Ph.D., is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Osaka, Japan. She received her B.A. in Environment and Information Studies from Keio University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Letters from Kyoto University. Her research focuses on the developmental and cognitive underpinnings of aggressive behavior. Her doctoral work examined how social exclusion shapes hostile cognition and aggression in Japanese children and adults. Her long-term goal is to understand the reasons behind aggressive behavior and how it can be managed in daily life, particularly in early childhood, while taking cultural background into account.

Abigail J. Anderson (University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, USA)
Abigail Anderson is a postdoctoral scholar for the Youth Development Lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She earned her BA in psychology and criminology from the Pennsylvania State University. She then completed her MA in Psychology, and her PhD in Applied Developmental Psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her research program is centered on understanding how contextual and developmental processes shape the emergence and long-term consequences of criminal behavior. Additionally, she is particularly interested in how social-cognitive processes, such as aggressive fantasies, legal cynicism and rumination, may serve as mechanisms that connect environmental stressors and behavioral risks across the life course.

Romi Paldi (Rutgers University — Newark, Newark, New Jersey, USA)
Romi Paldi is completing her PhD in Psychology at Rutgers University. She is a Research Affiliate at the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism (CSA-NYU) and a licensed clinical psychologist in Israel. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Psychology from Reichman University (formerly IDC Herzliya). Her research examines the development of aggressive behavior across childhood and adolescence, with a particular focus on normative beliefs about aggression, sibling aggression, and the role of family and community contexts in shaping aggressive behavior. Using longitudinal and developmental approaches, her work seeks to understand how aggressive beliefs emerge and are transmitted across generations to inform prevention and intervention efforts.

Jasmine Bigelow (Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, Indiana, USA)
Jasmine Bigelow is a PhD candidate in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. She uses longitudinal social network methodology to investigate how aggression development is shaped by youths’ peer networks. Specifically, Jasmine’s dissertation work is focused on the development of peer aggression during the middle school transition, a critical period during which youth navigating a novel peer environment utilize aggression as a mechanism to establish social status. Her work addresses a key gap in aggression research by investigating how social cognitive processes (agentic and communal social goals) operate within network structures to exacerbate or attenuate aggression trajectories, findings of which can inform individual- and network-level intervention strategies to mitigate adolescent aggression.

Monique Piggott (The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia)
Monique Piggott is a PhD candidate while also completing her Masters of Clinical Psychology at the University of Sydney Australia. Her research focuses on the intersection of social anxiety, aggression, and substance use in young adults, with the aim of advancing understanding of how these complex and often co-occurring presentations can inform psychological assessment and intervention. Through systematic reviews, epidemiological analyses, and clinical research, her work seeks to better characterise the relationships between these constructs and improve evidence-based approaches to care. Alongside her research, Monique has worked with a broad range of clients across the lifespan, including children, adolescents, young adults, older adults, and families, with a particular clinical and research interest in young adulthood given the heightened vulnerability for social anxiety, aggression, and substance use during this developmental period.

Zarmeen Shakil (Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)
Zarmeen Shakil, MA, is a mixed-methods researcher and PhD Candidate in Global Health and Development at the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. Her dissertation examines how sexual harassment is understood and measured in higher education settings in Pakistan. Her broader research focuses on gender-based violence, women’s and children’s health and development, and mental health in low- and middle-income countries and humanitarian settings.

Carmen Sánchez-Vázquez (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain)
Carmen Sánchez-Vázquez obtained her Bachelor of Psychology and Master’s degree in General Health Psychology at the University of Santiago de Compostela, where she is completing a PhD at the Research Unit for Risk Behaviors and Developmental Disorders (UNDERISK). Carmen’s research focuses on understanding how aggressive behaviors emerge and develop during childhood and adolescence. Her work examines the behavioral, cognitive, socioemotional and physiological predictors, outcomes and correlates of aggressive behaviors through multi-method assessment techniques to improve their early identification and inform preventive interventions. She is also interested in exploring more ecologically valid assessment tools and the potential of virtual reality for the assessment of externalizing behaviors in children and adolescents.

Cassidy E. Hatton (Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)
Cassidy Hatton is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University. Her research primarily focuses on the intersection between trust, violent attitudes, and violent behaviour. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches, including randomized experiments, she examines how generalized and institutional trust may influence violent attitudes and violent behaviour. Her broader research interests include intergroup trust and behaviour, authoritarian beliefs, and dominance orientation.

Misu Kim (University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia)
Misu Kim is a PhD candidate and casual academic in Criminology at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). Her research examines the role of alexithymia, trauma, personality functioning, and aggression in offending behaviour, integrating psychological and criminological perspectives. She holds an MPhil in Criminological Research from the University of Cambridge and completed a double major in Psychology and Law, Criminology and Deviance (LCD) at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Misu has published research on aggression and Forensic Psychology, teaches Criminology at UTS, and is passionate about translating research into evidence-informed approaches to crime prevention, rehabilitation, and criminal justice policy.

Tamar Mann-Kraus (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel)
Tamar Mann-Kraus is a licensed clinical psychologist with over 20 years of clinical experience and a Ph.D. candidate in Educational Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her B.A. in Psychology and Education and her M.A. in Educational and Clinical Child Psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her clinical training focused on adolescents with severe psychopathology, particularly trauma-related disorders and eating disorders, and she has worked for many years in psychiatric inpatient and eating disorder units while maintaining active clinical practice. Her clinical work with adolescents highlighted the profound impact that school aggression can have not only on victims but also on the many young people who witness it, motivating her research on the psychological correlates of bystander exposure to school aggression. By integrating meta-analytic and person-centered approaches, she seeks to better understand the mental health of this large heterogenous group and ultimately contribute to more effective prevention and intervention strategies that promote adolescent mental health.

Jewelian N. Fairchild (Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia, USA)
Jewelian Fairchild obtained her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Michigan State University and her Master of Science in Psychology from Old Dominion University. She is currently completing her doctoral studies at Old Dominion University under the mentorship of Dr. Christina Rodriguez. Jewelian’s research examines predictors of parents’ use of harsh and abusive parenting practices during early childhood, with a particular focus on the cognitive, emotional, and contextual processes that contribute to parenting risk. Her current dissertation work focuses on the intergenerational transmission of harsh and abusive parenting. Specifically, her work examines factors that may help explain continuity and discontinuity in parenting risk across generations. Through this research, she hopes to improve understanding of why some individuals continue cycles of at-risk parenting whereas others effectively disrupt them, with the broader aim of informing prevention and intervention efforts for at-risk families.

See Abstracts of Research Presented by the 2026 NI Group at the ISRA Meeting (PDF) →

 

  • Irina Bergenfeld (Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

    Heather Brittain (University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

    Travis Harries, Ph.D. (Deakin University, Victoria, Australia)

    Courtland S. Hyatt, Ph.D. (Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

    Alessia Iancarelli (Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA)

    Sophie L. Kjærvik, Ph.D. (Injury and Violence Prevention Program, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, USA)

    Annah McCurry (University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland)

    Tiffany L. Marcantonio, Ph.D. (University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA)

    Luz E. Robinson (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA)

    Evelyn Schapansky (Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium)

    Annabelle Wride (Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand)

    See Abstracts of Research Presented by the 2024 NI Group at the ISRA Meeting (PDF) →

  • Erinn Acland (University of Montreal and McGill University, Quebec, Canada, Canada)

    Alisson P. de Almeida (University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil)

    Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill (Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA)

    Ana Bravo (University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain)

    Karolina Dyduch-Hazar (SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland)

    Lena Hofhansel (University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany)

    Gretchen Perhamus (University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA)

    Anna Pham (Sexual Misconduct Response Centre with the Department of National Defence, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

    Travis Ray (Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA)

    Elizabeth Summerell (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)

    See Abstracts of Research Presented by the 2022 NI Group at the ISRA Meeting (PDF) →

  • Joanne Beames (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)

    Massil Benbouriche (Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA)

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

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

    Alexis Garcia (Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA)

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

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

    Patrick Green (Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA)

    Marlene Krauch (University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany)

    Ruschelle Leone (Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

    Eva Mishor (Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel)

    Kristin Perry (University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA)

    Danique Smeijers (Free University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

    Jean Von Hohendorff (IMED Passo Fundo, Passo Fundo, Brazil)

    Nick Wagner (University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA)

    See Abstracts of Research Presented by the 2018 NI Group at the ISRA Meeting (PDF) →

  • Laszlo Biro (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary)

    Khandis Blake (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)

    Irene Camerlink (Scotland’s Rural College, Scotland, UK)

    Chen Chen (Institute of Forensic Science, Shanghai, China)

    David Chester (University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA)

    Hailey Holmgren (Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA)

    Nathan Kolla (University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

    Antonio Mendoza Diaz (University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia)

    Tim Schofield (Australian National University, Canberra, Australia)

    Svenja Senkans (Swinburne University and Forensicare, Melbourne, Australia)

    Ian Stanley (Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA)

    Imdadul Haque Talukdar (Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland)

    Stacy Tzoumakis (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)

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

  • Emily Edwards (CUNY John Jay College, New York, New York, USA)

    Shawn Geniol (Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada)

    Ryan Harrod (University of Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska, USA)

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

    Richard Pond (University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, North Carolina, USA)

    Grace Skrzypiec (Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia)

    Patrik Söderberg (Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland)

    Laura Stockdale (Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA)

    Paulina Tomaszewska (University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany)

    Irene Vitoroulis (University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

    Weijun Wang (University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

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

  • Paul Adachi (Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada)

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

    Franziska Dambacher (Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands)

    Emma Fabiansson (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)

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

    Ada Johansson (Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland)

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

    Jill Lobbestael (Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands)

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

    Ingrid Obsuth (University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, UK)

    Aron Tulogdi (Institute of Experimental Medicine, Budapest, Hungary)

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

    Katja Bertsch (Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany)

    Justin Carre (Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA)

    Violet Cheung (University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA)

    Jennifer Fanning (University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA)

    Coreen Farris (University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA)

    Kate Gallagher (Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

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

    NIcole Warehime (Oklahoma Baptist University, Shawnee, Oklahoma, USA)

    Evrfim Cetinkaya Yildiz (Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey)

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

    Nathan Dewall (University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA)

    Whitney Heppner (University of Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

    Amanda Murray (University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

    Starr Sage (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA)

    Dominic Parrott (Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

    Maren Strenziok (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Washington, D.C., USA)

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