School of Psychology

Lucy Asher is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in the United Kingdom.  She joined the RVC in 2008, having previously completed a joint- BSc(hons) in Psychology and Zoology from Bristol University, an MSc in Animal Behaviour and Welfare at the University of Edinburgh, and a PhD in the Division of Psychology at Newcastle University (UK). Lucy's research interests centre around animal behaviour, and more specifically an understanding of the relationship between behaviour and welfare. She is currently working on a BBSRC animal welfare initiative which is run jointly between the RVC, and Oxford and BristolUniversities. The part of the project she is involved in concerns using complex analyses to score the behaviour of domestic hens. Previously she studied decision-making processes in choice tests using captive starlings, was involved in the development of new methodologies for measuring both affective state and the stress hormone corticosterone in captive starlings, and investigated the rationality of decision-making in rufous hummingbirds.

Paul Hanna is currently completing his PhD in the School of Applied Social Science at the University of Brighton (UK). Paul completed his undergraduate social science degree at the University of Brighton in 2006 and moved on to complete his masters degree at the University of Sussex in Applied Social Psychology (2007). During his masters he worked on a collaborative research project mapping psychosocial studies in the UK. Paul obtained an HSPRC PhD studentship in January 2008 and is currently working on his thesis looking at sustainable tourism as a form of ethical consumption. The thesis is an investigation into sustainable tourism from a psychosocial perspective addressing the concept of sustainable tourism, its construction, ethical meanings, identity and real world practice. He is also a member of the Consuming Identities Research Forum at the university.

Pieter Kroonenberg is a Professor at the Centre for Child and Family studies, Department of Education and Child Studies, at the University of Leiden(The Netherlands), where he holds the special Chair of Multivariate Analysis. Pieter’s work is focused on unraveling structures and relations in large databases, and in the representation of these structures in graphical form so that they can be easily understood. He has taught statistics in all years in Education and Child Studies. Data-analysis and statistics are obviously not limited to only one discipline, but cover many fields of the sciences and humanities. As such, Pieter’s wish is sometime to become a data-analytical homo universalis by conducting multivariate analyses in as many disciplines as possible to gain insight into all these different fields. In this regard, he enjoys being able to cooperate with researchers with varying interests.

Guy Hall is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Murdoch University . Guy has in excess of 25 years experience working with offenders. He held senior positions in the Western Australian prison system including Senior Clinical Psychologist and head of human resources. Guy joined the academic world in 1980 as a visiting fellow at Edith Cowan University and accepted a position at Murdoch in 1987 as a Senior Lecturer. Guy’s major research interests are in violent behaviour and its treatment; suicide and self harm in custody; restorative justice; prison law and management; and psychology and law. Guy has won two ARC collaborative grants with colleagues at Edith Cowan and Murdoch University on the Identification and Management of Suicidal Prisoners (with Professors D Thomson and K Howells) and an Evaluation of Restorative Justice (with Professor Simmons and Associate Professor Froyland). The collaborative partner in both grants were the WA Department of Justice.

Virginia Braun is a Senior Lecturer in the Psychology Department at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Her research focuses on an examination of the relationship between the social, the scientific and the individual, in relation to bodies, sexuality and health. She examines the influence of culture and society on individual choices, thoughts, feelings and behaviours, as well as on broader issues like public health policy and practice. Her research is specifically influenced by feminist, social constructionist, and discursive theory and practice, and tends to employ qualitative methodologies. Virginia is currently engaged in three main projects related to (women's) health, sexuality, the body, and popular culture: These projects are ‘the social contexts of STI transmission’, ‘female genital cosmetic surgery’, and ‘sexuality in higher education’. Her previous research has been on ‘sexual coercion among gay and bisexual men’, ‘sex in long-term relationships’, 'the vagina', cervical cancer (prevention policy), and safer heterosex. In addition, she has a strong interest in qualitative research methodology and is working with Dr Victoria Clarke (University of the West of England, UK) on a book on qualitative research methods (for Sage). Within the Department of Psychology at Auckland she is a member of the Gender & Critical Psychology Group (GCPG), and co-chair of the Department’s Maori and Pacific Liaison Committee. She is currently co-editor of the journal Feminism & Psychology.

Gillian Rhodes received her PhD from Stanford University in 1986 and is currently a professor of psychology at the University of Western Australia, where she holds an ARC Professorial Fellowship. Her work looks at how we read and assess faces and whether at least some of our criteria for attractiveness are encoded within us and not just socially imprinted. She also explores why we find attractiveness so vital and important. Preliminary data seems to imply that attractiveness is something that we instinctively recognise regardless of cultural background and is often linked to being a marker of health, fitness and reproductive ability. Aside from looking at attractiveness, Gillian is also looking into other aspects of how faces play a role in how we communicate to and assess other people. We've all heard that first impressions count, but with Gillian’s research we may finally understand why. Gillian has served on the editorial boards of numerous journals and is currently associate editor for Psychonomic Bulletin & Review and for Perception.

Tim Kurz is a lecturer in the School of Psychology at Murdoch University, a position he took up in 2006 having completed post-doctoral research in the United Kingdom at the Queen’s University of Belfast (2004) and Newcastle University (2005). Tim has a number of ongoing research projects, the first of which relates to the issue of climate change, and in particular, the intersection between government policy, political rhetoric and citizen action (at both an individual and collective level). He is also involved as a chief investigator in the recently funded State Government Centre of Research Excellence for “Climate Change and Forest and Woodland Health”. This is a large, interdisciplinary, multi-project research endeavor involving researchers from a range of disciplines including environmental science, biological science, education and psychology. In addition, Tim has an ongoing stream of research that is investigating the social psychology of the Australian suburban garden. Finally, he also has a stream of research that is concerned with studying the social construction of gender in society, which includes both discursive and experimental components. Tim serves on the advisory panel for the Days of Change community climate action initiative (daysofchange.org) and is also a member of the Australian Psychological Society’s Environmental Issues and Climate Change Reference Group.