Lab Events

Annie Lalande (MD) has successfully defended her PhD!

Welcome Simon Sheppard and Hayley Simpson to our lab! Simon is a new Master's student in psychology and Hayley is a new Master's student in IRES.

The documentary movie Close the Divide that JZ featured in was screened at VIFF! The movie is now available on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and YouTube movies!

Congratulations to Jade Radke for winning the Indigenous Graduate Fellowship and the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship!!

Congratulations to Jade Radke for successfully defending her MA thesis!

Congratulations to Dr. Brandon Tomm for successfully defending his PhD dissertation!

Check out my new TED talk on how to take action on climate change and get happier!

Congratulations to Annie Lalande for getting the competitive CIHR Doctoral Scholarship AND congratulations to Annie for receiving the UBC Sustainability Leadership Award!!

Congratulations to Jaden Phillips for becoming the Youth Engagement Coordinator at Climate Reality Canada!

Rumi Naito and Yu Luo have successfully defended their PhDs!

Welcome Jade Radke to our lab! Jade is a new Master's student in IRES.

Congratulations to Annie Lalande for getting funding from the UBC Public Scholars Initiative!

Congratulations to Ryan Dwyer for successfully passing his PhD defense!

Double congratulations to Jade Radke, a new incoming Master's student, for winning the Aboriginal Graduate Fellowship and the SSHRC CGSM scholarship!

Congratulations to Annie Lalande for getting the Killam Doctoral Scholarship!

Brynley Hanson-Wright has successfully defended her MSc thesis! This is also our first in-person thesis defense since 2020.

Liz Dunn and I co-created the Happy Climate Workshop that uses the science of sweet spot approach to increase happiness while reducing carbon emissions. This workshop can be run in any group anywhere with anyone.

Welcome Jaden Phillips, Lyra Shi, and Andrew Li to our lab! Jaden is an incoming Master's student in IRES and Lyra and Andrew are incoming Master's students in Psychology.

Huge congratulations to Ru Qi Yu for getting a junior faculty position at the East China Normal University in Shanghai!

Huge congratulations to Annie Lalande for being accepted into the Clinician-Investigator Program!

Congratulations to Nigel Deans for winning the SSHRC graduate fellowship!

Check out our video on happy sustainability! Thank you to Magic Bullet Media and the House of Beautiful Business for producing the video!

Andrea Byfuglien successfully defended her MSc thesis online!

Our article in Boston Globe with Liz Dunn on actions to take to reduce carbon footprint while increasing happiness!

It's official!

Our op-eds on motivated attention in climate change perception and action in Medium and The Conversation.

Ale has successfully defended her PhD dissertation!

Andrea attends the United Nations High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development as a Canada Youth Delegate working on Sustainable Development Goals!

Congratulations to Yu Luo for winning the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship!

Welcome Gage Peterson and James Wu to our lab! Gage is an incoming MA student in Psychology and James is an incoming PhD student in IRES.

Huge congratulations to Ryan Dwyer for winning the Vanier Scholarship!

After five years of hard work!

Congratulations to Ivana Zelenika for passing her PhD defense!

Welcome Andrea Byfuglien to our lab! Andrea is a new Master's student in IRES after her double bachelor's degrees in psychology and geography from University of Melbourne.

Congratulations to Yu Luo for winning the Cordula and Gunter Paetzold Fellowship!

Our op-ed on water conservation nudges in Cape Town, South Africa in The Conversation.

Our op-ed on visual attention and climate change in The Conversation.

Our new study with Anuj Shah, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir on money in the mental lives of the poor.

Our recent studies on scarcity are featured in VICE Magazine and Mic.

Congratulations to Ru Qi Yu for winning the NSERC CGSD Doctoral fellowship and Ale for winning the Killam Doctoral Scholarship!

Rumi Naito is joining the lab as a new PhD student starting September 2017!

Media reports on Alex's new paper demonstrating how convenience improves recycling and composting behavior in high-rise multi-family buildings.

Brandon Tomm, Ru Qi Yu, and Yu Luo presented their work at the 2016 Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting.

Katherine (Rae) Cramer and Yu Luo are joining the lab as new graduate students!

Media reports about our work on recycling and water conservation from UBC, CBC, CBC Radio, Radio Canada International, and Roundhouse Radio.

We are launching a real-time energy display project in 15 academic and residential buildings on UBC campus. You can select any building on the first page and see what the display looks like. The goal of this project is to see how real-time energy consumption information influences actual energy consumption behaviors of the inhabitants in the building.

Based on our research, Nascent Objects have developed a modular device called Droppler that listens to water sounds in the environment and offers visual feedback of water use in real time, in order to reduce water consumption. Here is more information about the device: UBC Psychology, Crowdfund Insider, Live Science, and Co.Exist.

We have launched an online sorting game to train people on how to sort their waste correctly based on UBC sorting policies. The goal of this project is to see whether this game improves actual recycling and composting rates on campus.

Our new Behavioral Sustainability Lab has finally finished its renovation and can proudly serve students from Psychology Department and IRES, featured as the lab of the month.

Congrats to Ru for winning the NSERC graduate fellowship!

Hopping through trees with the lab in the UBC Botanic Garden.

Congrats to Ale for winning the Graduate Global Leadership Fellowship! She was ranked the first out of the only two fellowships awarded.

Congrats to Ru for winning the Elizabeth Young Lacey Scholarship in Psychology!

Alejandra Echeverri presented her talk on how messaging shapes attitudes towards sea otters as a species at risk at the Annual Meeting of Canadian Association of Geographers.

Ru Qi Yu and Yu Luo presented their posters at the 2015 Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting.

At the 17th Annual Psychology Undergrad Research Conference at UBC, Ruzzelle Gasmen presented her talk on how environmental perceptions shape subjective well-being, Yu Wang presented her poster on the cognitive biases in the perception of climate change, and Desmond Fung presented his poster on how scarcity tunes attention.

Brandon Tomm and Ru Qi Yu are joining the lab as new graduate students in the Department of Psychology!

We are launching the Happiness Project at UBC! This project investigates how the immediate physical environment shapes subjective well-being.

Congrats to Sumeyye for winning the Robert Sommer Award for best student paper awarded by the Canadian Psychological Association! Check out her poster here.

Sumeyye Cakal presented her talk on how statistical regularities shape object perception, Yu Luo presented his talk on how regularities alter the spatial scale of attention, and Ru Qi Yu presented his poster on the persistent attentional bias to regularities, at the 14th Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting, in St. Pete Beach, Florida.

My awesome lab in the Rose Garden at UBC.

Congrats to Sumeyye for winning the Student Engagement Award from the PSA!

Congrats to Liz for winning the Master's Student Fellowship awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council!

Sumeyye Cakal and Yu Luo presented their posters at the 16th Annual Psychology Undergrad Research Conference at UBC.

Congrats to Ru for winning the Psychology Summer Research Assistantship in 2014!

Congrats to Sumeyye for winning the Quinn Travel Award in 2014!

My wonderful students and RAs, many more not included in the photo.