Submitted by: William Ridgway, Chair, GSTA
Happy 2022!
We are excited to announce four new committee members will join the Graduate Student Teaching Association (GSTA) for 2022! Additionally, two of our previous members will be moving into their new roles as Chair and Associate Chair! We are grateful to our outgoing members and look forward to working with our new team. The GSTA will be meeting later in January to discuss the budget, ways to increase engagement with graduate students, and how to maintain the visibility of Division 2 and the GSTA. We look forward to another engaging year! Over the next few months, we will feature each of the GSTA members in more depth by asking them to share about their teaching and research experiences. Be on the lookout for these interviews to come!
Chair: William Ridgway
William Ridgway is a doctoral student in Psychological and Brain Sciences at University of Nevada, Las Vegas with master’s degrees in Experimental and Forensic Psychology. His academic research focuses on the application of psychological theories to criminal justice issues. William has been the instructor of record for Introduction to Psychology and Forensic Psychology.
Associate Chair: Madeline Bruce
Madeline (Mads) J. Bruce is a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology at Saint Louis University. Her research currently focuses on posttraumatic adjustment, identity, and growth. Interested in evidence-based practice in her clinical work, research, and teaching, her work on trigger warnings was some of the first to subject this controversial topic to empirical scrutiny. In her free time, she enjoys ultra swimming, running, and eating.
Steering Committee Members
Jackson Pelzner
Jackson Pelzner is a doctoral student at University of Nevada, Las Vegas with a master’s degree in Applied Psychological Science. His research touches on topics in mental model construction, visual language learning, deep fakes and deception, and melody recognition. He currently teaches remote learning sections of Introductory Psychology.
Morgan Franklin
Morgan Franklin, M.A. is a 4th-year clinical psychology doctoral student at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale. Her research interests include treatment outcomes, technology-enhanced interventions, and examining processes of change proposed in the ACT framework. Morgan has 4 years of experience teaching several courses in multiple instructional modalities.
Madeleine Pownall
Madeleine Pownall is a Lecturer in Psychology and PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, UK. She was the 2021 recipient of the STP Wilbert J, McKeachie Teaching Excellence award. Madeleine is passionate about supporting early career educators, embedding open science into undergraduate training, and equality and inclusion in teaching.
Christopher Kleva
Christopher Kleva is a clinical psychology doctoral student at Virginia Commonwealth University with a concentration on Behavioral Medicine. Broadly, his research interests involve the classification of psychopathology and clinician cognition. Chris has assisted in teaching Introduction to Psychology and has led multiple lab sections of Research Methods.
