People

Principle Investigator

Jennifer Stellar

Jennifer is a social/personality psychologist at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in emotions, morality, prosociality, health, and well-being.

Curriculum Vitae

Department Website

Social Personality Research Group Website

Postdoctoral Fellow

Aida Ramezani

Aida completed her PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto. Her research explores the interplay of language, morality, and AI. She draws on natural language processing, machine learning, moral psychology, cognitive science, and computational social science to develop computational methodologies for understanding temporal and cultural variation in moral values informed by how people use language and AI tools.

Graduate Students

**The application is closed for new graduate students to start in the fall of 2026. Please check back for the 2027 cycle.**

Jaweria Qaiser

Jaweria is a Ph.D student in Social/Personality Psychology. Her primary research interests center on empathy. She has examined physiological synchrony during empathy, how empathy and compassion change in response to repeated exposure to suffering, and empathy for groups. Click here to see Jaweria’s work on empathy.

Jesse Whiteman

Jesse is a PhD student in Social/Personality Psychology. His main interests involve the connections between emotions and health. Specifically, he is interested in exploring the impact of awe on immunological outcomes like pro-inflammatory cytokines.

Shernell Hines

Shernell is a Ph.D student in Social/Personality Psychology. Her research interests centre around the relationship between emotions and well-being with an interdisciplinary focus on how
this can improve Women’s Health. She is particularly interested in self-conscious and self-transcendent emotions, and their impact on self concept, well-being, and physiological processes.

Affiliated Graduate Students

Éloïse Côté

Éloïse Côté is a PhD student in Social/Personality Psychology. Her primary research focuses on understanding the content and consequences of politicians’ moral rhetoric. Her work in the lab focuses on how observers evaluate ideologically motivated transgressive behaviour.

Alumni

Yachen Li (graduate student), Research Associate, Blueprint
Fred Duong (postdoctoral fellow), Senior Research Manager, More in Common
Nathan Leonhardt (affiliated graduate student), Assistant Professor, Brigham Young University
Rachel Forbes (graduate student), Senior Data Scientist, Shopify

Undergraduates

**HEAL is currently full, but we will be taking on new undergraduate research assistants to start in the summer and fall of 2026. If you are interested in applying, please submit an application through the university’s ROP or you can apply as a volunteer by emailing healUofT@gmail.com for an application.

Lab Manager
Linh Pham

Research Assistants
Begum Seri
Sumayya Farooqui
Salma Boutrig
Sandra Risco
Ebosetale Oyamienlen
Jiayi Yu
Navneet Aujla
Drishya Mitra
Abrahim Ali Randhawa
Zainab Hassan Rizvi
Aleena Mahveesh
Kristina Anica Ryan
Yaqi Huang