Vice-President (Research)
Penny Pexman
Contact: vpr@uwo.ca
Administrative Support: Kristina Fornelos, Executive Specialist to the Vice-President (Research)
Biography
Penny Pexman is Vice-President (Research) and Professor of Psychology at Western.
Penny previously spent 25 years at the University of Calgary, where she served in a number of research leadership roles, including Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts and Associate Vice-President (Research).
She has served on numerous committees and adjudication panels for funding organizations, including as Chair of NSERC’s Biological Systems and Functions panel and of the NSERC Banting Selection Committee. She is past President of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science, past Governing Board Chair for the Psychonomic Society, and co-founder of Women in Cognitive Science - Canada.
Penny’s research expertise is in cognitive development, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. In broad terms, she is interested in how we derive meaning from language, and how those processes are changed by damage or experience. For more than two decades, her work has been continuously funded by both SSHRC and NSERC, including NSERC’s prestigious Discovery Accelerator Supplement.
She is an elected fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science and has been honoured with nine awards for mentorship and teaching excellence.
