Biography

 (Christmas 2007-2008 in Puerto Vallarta)

After working in a Neurology laboratory for several summers as an undergraduate researcher I decided to attend graduate school in 1995. I completed a Master of Science degree at the University of Calgary in the Department of Applied Psychology in the Faculty of Education.  My research was  supervised by Dr. John Mueller (Professor of Applied Psychology) and Dr. Eva Pajurkova (Clinical Neuropsychologist at Foothills Hospital). I studied the development of executive functions in children as a consequence brain development and schooling.  This research demonstrated that at younger ages the effects of brain maturation were larger than those of schooling which is not unexpected given the ample structural neuroimaging data illustrating the rapid development of white matter tracts in the brain (e.g., see Beaulieu et al, 2004; Snook et al, 2004 under publications.).    I graduated with the Master of Science in the spring of 1998 and this research was published in Child Neuropsychology in 1999.                 

In the spring of 1997 I accepted a full scholarship to study at the University of Alberta in the Department of Educational Psychology. This research examined the construct validity of Das-Naglieri Cognitive Assessment System in a sample of cerebrovascular disease patients with focal strokes. This stroke study was conducted under the supervision of Dr. Thomas Snyder of the University of Alberta Hospital's Department of Neuropsychology and Dr. Mark Gierl with the Centre for Applied Measurement and Evaluation in the Department of Educational Psychology. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and was published in Brain and Cognition, International Journal of Neuroscience, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology and Psychology Research and Behavioral Management. I graduated with the Doctorate in Educational Psychology with a specialization in Learning, Development and Instruction in the fall of 2001.

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(Zanna aged 4 cooking with her Dad)

In the spring of 2001 I was awarded a National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) post-doctoral fellowship to study structural and functional neuroimaging at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Alberta. These studies were conducted under the auspices of Dr. Christian Beaulieu of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Dr Chris Westbury of the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta. We examined the functional neural correlates of body representations using functional MRI and this research was published in Behavioral Brain Research. We also conducted a second study on the functional neural correlates of grasping verbs and mirror neurons with Dr. Chris Westbury and Dr. Jeffrey Binder of the Department of Neurology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. The second study was published in Brain and Cognition.

In the fall of 2004 I began studies with Dr. Branch Coslett at the Department of Cognitive Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Dr. Coslett is a renowned cognitive neuroscientist with interests in human spatial navigation, motor control and the temporal processing of language. I was involved in a cognitive neuropsychological single case study of simultanagnosia which is the inability to perceive more than one object at a time. Simultanagnosia was shown by one of the founders of modern neuropsychology, Russian neurologist Alexander Luria, to result from bilateral occipito-parietal lesions to the cortex. Simultanagnosia was historically important in providing the first insights into the functions of the dorsal and ventral streams model of cortical processing (e.g., see Milner and Goodale's, 2006 The Visual Brain in Action). This research was published in Neuropsychologia.

In January of 2006 I began studies with Dr. Jason Barton at the Department of Neuro-ophthalomology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Dr. Barton is a former Norman Geschwind Prize for Behavioral Neurology (2005) winner as well as a Canada Research Chair in Neuropsychology. He has  research interests in motion perception, blindsight, visual neglect, alexia, ventral stream cortical functions such as prosopagnosia. At the University of British Columbia I was involved in studies examining contemporary theories of human cerebral lateralization and mood disorders as well as cortical models of the development of intuition and insight. This research was the culmination of studies into the functions of the dorsal and ventral streams studied at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of British Columbia. This work was published in Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment and Psychology Research and Behavioral Management.     

(Zanna on horseback in Puerto Vallarta in 2008)

(Palm Springs in February of 2011)

(Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan in 2011)