Gigi Luk and Armando Bertone: Professors Luk and Bertone will assess which online language assessment practices are appropriate for young multilingual learners with the goal of developing more accessible approaches that favour diverse and inclusive participation in research.

Tina Montreuil: Professor Montreuil will examine how parenting stress and emotion regulation mediate the relationship between parenting self-efficacy and quality, and underscores family well-being as a key predictor of child outcomes and the need for better family support.

Master of Arts

• Mira Bhattacharya: Bhattacharya focuses on understanding how music is experienced and used in the daily lives of autistic and non-autistic children, with the aim of supporting inclusive, strengths-based approaches to early childhood development.
• Alicia Martineau: Martineau analyzes longitudinal depressive and anxiety symptoms in mothers and fathers using subjective and objective sleep measures to understand the association between infant sleep and parental mental health in the perinatal period.
• Charlène Thauvin: Thauvin assesses cross-cultural differences in preschool napping practices and educators’ beliefs in Quebec and France, highlighting how sleep policies may reflect institutional and cultural norms more than children’s sleep needs.
• Karissa Vallera: Vallera examines the efficacy of a short-term, adapted CBT-I intervention to improve the sleep quality of children with autism and their family functioning.

PhD

• Andrew Burcar: Burcar investigates the psychosocial, contextual, and sociodemographic determinants of early paternal involvement from pregnancy through six months postpartum to understand how father engagement shapes infants’ social-emotional and cognitive development, maternal well-being, and early caregiving environments within the Canadian context.
• Gia Han Ly (Michelle): Ly analyzes the association between infant sleep, parental sleep and infant-parent interaction to further understand how infant sleep quality is associated with attachment and parental sensitivity.
• Maria Stergiou: Stergiou studies the role of pre-service teachers’ responses to children’s literature about diverse family structures using collage-making to understand pedagogy and educational strategies in early childhood education.
• Jingyi Wang: Wang assesses how parents’ multilingual practices shape young children’s early multilingual development, aiming to promote a healthy and inclusive home language environment.
• Stephanie Zito: Zito examines educator attitudes toward school-based mindfulness interventions to understand how teachers’ beliefs, perceptions, and training needs influence the implementation of school-based mindfulness practices that can enhance social-emotional development and learning outcomes for neurodiverse children in inclusive classrooms.
• Éric Papineau: Papineau explores the role of a single-session of mindfulness-based intervention in reducing parental burnout and strengthening emotion regulation and resilience. He seeks to understand how equipping caregivers with effective tools and enhancing their well-being can improve behavioural, emotional, and developmental outcomes in the lives of neurodiverse children and their families.

MA

Valerie Friedenberg examines how different forms of praise, dispositional versus process, influence how children navigate the conflict between honesty and helpfulness values, providing evidence-based insights to help parents and educators foster healthy moral development and prosocial behavior.

Maya Divangahi studies different profiles of maltreated children in CPS and examines how they impact the effectiveness of parenting programs that help families leave CPS. Her research aims to improve services for vulnerable families and reduce child suffering caused by maltreatment.

PhD

Clea Corman explores the impact of integrated school-community partnerships on vulnerable rural children transitioning into elementary school to further understand how holistic early intervention shapes positive development and long-term educational success.

Amy Jolin examines the relationship between beat perception and literacy skills in neurodivergent youth as a possible accessible, non-verbal assessment tool, thus facilitating earlier detection of reading difficulties for autistic and dyslexic children.

Taking a strengths-based perspective, Luc Langille investigates the role of music in the lived experience of autistic children to further understand the benefits and uses of music in their lives and the lives of their families.

Kelly D’Souza analyzes how caregivers, autistic individuals, educators, and healthcare practitioners can co-design family centered, culturally responsive, and neurodiversity-affirming therapeutic programming to support the developmental outcomes and quality of life of autistic children and their families.