ISRA began its New Investigators (NI) Program at the 2008 World Meeting in Budapest to encourage and assist scholars who are getting started or are in the early stages of their aggression research career.

ISRA encourages enrolled doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career researchers within 3 years of their terminal graduate degree to apply for the program.

Awardees receive partial monetary support to attend an ISRA World Meeting and also participate in a tailored program at the World Meeting that typically includes:

  1. A Pre-Conference NI Workshop
    The Workshop brings together NIs and group leaders to engage in didactic and group activities designed to support and facilitate NIs professional development and, ultimately, research-based career trajectories. Activities typically include a focus on manuscript and grant writing, reviewing and evaluating research, strategies for building a research program, and being competitive on the job market. NIs are encouraged to read assigned articles prior to the Workshop and submit their own work (e.g., a manuscript or grant proposal in preparation) to be discussed in the Workshop.

  2. Meeting With Mentors
    NIs meet with a different panel of mentors during lunch or dinner each day for informal discussion. Mentors may include plenary speakers who are available for follow-up questions about their presentations.

  3. Networking
    NIs will meet with senior members of ISRA. They will also have opportunities to interact professionally and socially with other new investigators during and outside of the pre-conference Workshop. Mutual support and fruitful collaborations have developed out of past NI interactions.

    Participants in the NI Program have found it to be an enjoyable and enriching experience.

New Investigators Mentorship Program

Beginning in 2024, the ISRA New Investigators (NI) Program will give NIs an opportunity to participate in a special ISRA Mentorship program.

NIs will have the opportunity to participate in a short internship of 2-3 weeks with a senior ISRA researcher at the mentor’s host university. Potential outcomes of the mentorship program may include the creation of sustainable partnerships and collaborations, the opportunity to develop a symposium for the next ISRA biennial world meeting, the opportunity to write an article for the ISRA Bulletin, and the opportunity to develop a joint research and publication project.

NI members will be eligible to receive substantial financial support from ISRA and/or the host mentor.

 

NEW INVESTIGATORS

2024

Irina Bergenfeld, MPH, is completing a PhD in Global Health and Development at Emory University. Her work primarily deals with measurement and prevention of violence against women and girls, including sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and child marriage. She has served as a Violence Against Women data consultant for the World Health Organization. Building on prior global analyses, Irina’s dissertation will focus on improving global measurement of intimate partner violence. She is also currently a co-investigator on a grant to develop an intervention to reduce sexual harassment at universities in Pakistan.

Heather Brittain obtained her Bachelor of Arts (psychology) from McMaster University and Master’s degrees from the University of Ottawa (education) and McMaster University (statistics). She is a Canada Vanier Scholar, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Heather is completing her doctoral studies at the University of Ottawa under the mentorship of Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt. She is interested in the areas of peer aggression and psychosocial functioning in adolescence and emerging adulthood. Her current focus is examining how major life events and transitions, such as the transition to high school, can be studied as perturbations to the developmental course of aggressive behaviour, mental health, and academic achievement. Heather is also interested in studying heterogeneity in development. Specifically, she seeks to identify risk and protective factors that differentiate individuals who are impervious to life transitions, from others who are positively or negatively impacted. Heather aims to further investigate how unique responses to early experiences differentially relate to behaviour and mental health functioning in adulthood.

Travis Harries, Ph.D., is an Associate Lecturer in Psychology at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, and is a member of the CONNECT collaborative research centre and the Centre for Social and Early Emotional Development (SEED). His research area is family violence, with a specific focus on child-to-parent violence. His research explores the family conditions which predispose and perpetuate child-to-parent violence, with an emphasis on dynamic risk factors which can be modified through formal intervention. He works closely with clinical services to translate research into practice, understand clinical need, and evaluate programs for reducing family violence. 

Courtland S. Hyatt, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University (Atlanta, GA, USA). He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies in psychology at the University of Georgia (Athens, GA, USA), and his clinical internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the VA Puget Sound Healthcare System (Seattle, WA, USA). Courtland’s primary research interests are the individual differences (e.g., personality traits, psychopathology symptoms) that precipitate aggressive/antagonistic behavior, and how these risk factors can inform effective interventions to reduce aggression. In this pursuit, he strives to incorporate multiple methodologies (e.g., behavioral paradigms, structural neuroimaging) and align with open science principles (e.g., preregistration, open data/code) to improve the robustness and replicability of his work. Moving forward, Courtland plans to further these lines of research in his current academic setting, deliver evidence-based care to his patients, and contribute to the development of interventions to reduce harmful aggression in a diverse range of patient populations.

Alessia Iancarelli is completing a PhD in Psychology at Northeastern University. Her research explores how anger influences third-party punitive attitudes, focusing on both physical and non-physical punishments. Despite extensive studies on third-party punishment, the specific role of anger in these contexts remains underexplored. Through three studies, her research has investigated whether integral (context-linked) or incidental (external) anger predicts Punishment Acceptance (PA). Findings indicate that integral anger strongly predicts non-physical PA, while its impact on physical PA is weaker. This research highlights the importance of considering the source and context of emotions in understanding punitive judgments. In addition to behavioral studies, Alessia plans on using 7T fMRI to investigate the neural basis of moral outrage in contexts with and without physical aggression. By examining brain regions associated with aggression in animal studies, such as the hypothalamus and periaqueductal gray, she aims to determine if these areas are also involved in human moral outrage. This research will provide insights into the context dependency of moral outrage and its neural representation.

Sophie L. Kjærvik, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Injury and Violence Prevention Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Sophie received her B.A. in Psychology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, M.A. in Psychology from the University of Oslo, and Ph.D. in Communication from The Ohio State University. Sophie’s research focuses on individual differences in aggressiveness and the effects and solutions for aggressive behavior. Particularly, she is interested in effective ways of preventing and reducing aggression and understanding individual differences that positively or negatively relate to aggression. Currently, her research is focused on identifying risk and protective factors for violence and using virtual reality interventions to reduce retaliatory violence following violence victimization.

Annah McCurry received her B.Sc. honours (with distinction) from Quest University Canada in 2022. She is currently a 2nd year PhD student at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) studying emotional (co)regulation within intimate partner aggression. At St Andrews, she and her advisory team have produced a website for their new research group, Domestic Abuse Research and Impact Scotland (DARIS), and are working with Computer Science to produce a self-updating database of Domestic Abuse services in the UK (to remove the burden from service providers). Separately, they are working with another computing team to improve the current gold standard for automated affect coding using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Within her research, Annah has programmed a custom modification of the Competitive Reaction Time Task (CRTT) to work with dyads, face-to-face. She is using the Face-to-Face format to investigate the influence of each participant’s emotion on both themself and their partner, further examining how this interactive co-regulation (or lack thereof) impacts aggression. Annah is developing a new method for studying dyadic conflict in the lab, attempting to balance ecological validity and experimental control. Eventually, she would like to expand her research with adults into the adolescent population to track the development of abusive behaviours in early dating relationships.

Tiffany L. Marcantonio, Ph.D., is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama in the Department of Health Science. She received her PhD in Community Health Promotion from the University of Arkansas in 2022. The overarching aim of her research program is to reduce alcohol related sexual violence via understanding how alcohol use impacts prevention efforts to sexual violence or increases the risk for sexual violence to occur. Specifically, she focuses on how alcohol use impacts sexual consent and sexual refusal communication. She is also interested in how alcohol use reduces one’s ability to intervene when they witness concerning or problematic sexual situations. In addition to these areas, she examines how acute intoxication can increase the risk for men to engage in sexual violence perpetration and has conducted several alcohol administration projects (her favorite!). At the University of Alabama, she oversees the Consent, Alcohol, and Sexual Assault (CASA) Research Lab. You can follow them at @_casalab on Instagram.

Luz E. Robinson is a 4th year doctoral candidate in school psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For the last seven years, she has worked as a research assistant in Dorothy Espelage’s Research Addressing Violence in Education (RAVE) lab and has disseminated research on youth violence prevention. She has co-authored 30 peer-reviewed publications, eight book chapters and over a dozen conference submissions. Her research interests include suicide prevention, interpersonal violence prevention, and understanding protective factors to improve outcomes for Hispanic and other historically marginalized youth in schools and clinical settings. Her clinical work as a bilingual mental health therapist providing culturally responsive mental health services to Spanish speaking youth and families informs her research. She also co-teaches an upstream suicide prevention course at UNC for undergraduate students with Dr. Espelage and was recently awarded a Ford Foundation predoctoral fellowship from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Luz will be completing her APA-accredited internship at the Medical University of South Carolina from Fall 2024-Spring 2025 and is on the academic job market for a tenure-track faculty position beginning Fall 2025

Evelyn Schapansky received her B.Sc. in Psychology from Bielefeld University (Germany) and her M.Sc. in Clinical-Forensic Psychology & Victimology from the University of Groningen (Netherlands). Her research interests include sexual victimization and perpetration, its risk and protective factors, and the role of gender-related attitudes in sexual violence perpetration. Since 2019, she has been part of the Institute for International Research on Criminal Policy at Ghent University (Belgium). There, she worked on a large-scale, national study looking into the prevalence and risk factors of sexual violence in the Belgian general population. Since November 2021, she has been a PhD Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). The focus of her PhD lies on the identification, measurement, and promotion of anti-rape attitudes as a potential protective factor against rape perpetration.

Annabelle Wride is a Forensic Psychology PhD candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, having previously received her BSc and MSc degrees at the same institution. Her primary research interests lie in the explanation of harmful behaviours, with a view towards improving community outcomes through policy and intervention practices. Currently, she is constructing a new theory of intimate partner aggression, employing qualitative analysis to understand the functions and motivations underlying this aggression. She has previously worked on research in the domains of child social-cognitive development, jury decision-making, and face recognition, and enjoys integrating knowledge from these diverse perspectives to understand social, justice, and clinical-related issues. After completing her PhD studies and qualification in clinical psychology, Annabelle aims to use both her clinical and research skills to improve the quality of offence-related interventions, whether at an academic institution or in clinical practice. She is committed to challenging assumptions about the causes of aggression, and advancing an understanding of crime that considers the person beyond their offending. 

 

  • Erinn Acland (University of Montreal and McGill University, Quebec, Canada, Canada)

    Alisson P. de Almeida (University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil)

    Kwan-Lamar Blount-Hill (Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA)

    Ana Bravo (University of Córdoba, Córdoba, Spain)

    Karolina Dyduch-Hazar (SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland)

    Lena Hofhansel (University Hospital RWTH Aachen, Aachen, Germany)

    Gretchen Perhamus (University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA)

    Anna Pham (Sexual Misconduct Response Centre with the Department of National Defence, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

    Travis Ray (Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA)

    Elizabeth Summerell (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)

    See Abstracts of Research Presented by the 2022 NI Group at the ISRA Meeting (PDF) →

  • Joanne Beames (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)

    Massil Benbouriche (Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA)

    Ashlee Curtis (Deakin University, Odyssey House Victoria, Geelong, Australia)

    Gabriela Gan (Central Institute of Mental Health Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany)

    Alexis Garcia (Florida International University, Miami, Florida, USA)

    Gadi Gilam (Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center; Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel; Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA)

    Elizabeth “Beth” Green (University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, USA)

    Patrick Green (Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA)

    Marlene Krauch (University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany)

    Ruschelle Leone (Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

    Eva Mishor (Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel)

    Kristin Perry (University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA)

    Danique Smeijers (Free University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

    Jean Von Hohendorff (IMED Passo Fundo, Passo Fundo, Brazil)

    Nick Wagner (University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA)

    See Abstracts of Research Presented by the 2018 NI Group at the ISRA Meeting (PDF) →

  • Laszlo Biro (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary)

    Khandis Blake (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)

    Irene Camerlink (Scotland’s Rural College, Scotland, UK)

    Chen Chen (Institute of Forensic Science, Shanghai, China)

    David Chester (University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA)

    Hailey Holmgren (Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA)

    Nathan Kolla (University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

    Antonio Mendoza Diaz (University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia)

    Tim Schofield (Australian National University, Canberra, Australia)

    Svenja Senkans (Swinburne University and Forensicare, Melbourne, Australia)

    Ian Stanley (Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA)

    Imdadul Haque Talukdar (Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland)

    Stacy Tzoumakis (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)

    See Abstracts of Research Presented by the 2016 NI Group at the ISRA Meeting (PDF)

  • Emily Edwards (CUNY John Jay College, New York, New York, USA)

    Shawn Geniol (Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada)

    Ryan Harrod (University of Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska, USA)

    Zurika Odendaal (University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa)

    Richard Pond (University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, North Carolina, USA)

    Grace Skrzypiec (Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia)

    Patrik Söderberg (Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland)

    Laura Stockdale (Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA)

    Paulina Tomaszewska (University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany)

    Irene Vitoroulis (University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

    Weijun Wang (University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

    Jiansong Zhou (Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Hunan, China)

  • Paul Adachi (Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada)

    Gareth Arnott (Queen's University-Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK)

    Franziska Dambacher (Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands)

    Emma Fabiansson (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia)

    Youssef Hasan (University of Pierre Mendes-France, Grenoble, France)

    Ada Johansson (Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland)

    Nadja Laubscher (University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa)

    Jill Lobbestael (Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands)

    Maria Noel Meikle (Instituto de Investigaciones Biológicas Clemente Estable, Departamento de Montevideo, Uruguay)

    Ingrid Obsuth (University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, UK)

    Aron Tulogdi (Institute of Experimental Medicine, Budapest, Hungary)

  • Daniel Antonius (New York University School of Medicine, New York, New York, USA)

    Katja Bertsch (Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany)

    Justin Carre (Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA)

    Violet Cheung (University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA)

    Jennifer Fanning (University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA)

    Coreen Farris (University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA)

    Kate Gallagher (Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

    Kevin Swartout (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA)

    NIcole Warehime (Oklahoma Baptist University, Shawnee, Oklahoma, USA)

    Evrfim Cetinkaya Yildiz (Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey)

  • Catalina Cervantes (University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA)

    Nathan Dewall (University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky, USA)

    Whitney Heppner (University of Georgia, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

    Amanda Murray (University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

    Starr Sage (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA)

    Dominic Parrott (Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA)

    Maren Strenziok (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Washington, D.C., USA)

    Andra Teten (Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, Houston, Texas, USA)