About Me

I grew up in Southern Ontario in the 1990s. My house had a crabapple tree, a computer that used floppy discs, and a library with more science fiction books than any child could safely consume. My mom’s own path in academia brought her, my dad, and I to Kelowna, BC when I was 13 years old. As her independent laboratory grew and her research programme in analytical chemistry took off, my parents’ house became increasingly occupied by visiting scholars and graduate students from all over the world. I was very fortunate in this respect, finding myself surrounded by kind people who had successfully built their careers in scientific research.

I moved to Vancouver to attend The University of British Columbia shortly after I turned 18. I was always interested in the similarities between people and computers, and this drew me towards neuroscience and cognitive psychology. I completed two undergraduate honours theses supervised by Drs. Jim Enns, Todd Handy, Julia Kam and Marcus Watson. These projects were my first hands-on experience with attention research, motion tracking, and EEG. They allowed me to work with unique samples of people who experienced synesthesia, or who had recently undergone chemotherapy.

Towards the end of my undergraduate degree, I visited a small casino in my hometown. I remember watching from the bar as a man played a slot machine for more than 30 minutes, his eyes utterly fixed on the device’s repetitive, spinning reels. I remember wondering how the game could hold this man’s attention so completely, despite showing him the same handful of symbols over and over. This was the start of my fascination with the cognitive science of gambling. Serendipitously, this was the same year that Luke Clark — then based at Cambridge — accepted a position at my alma mater. Speaking with Luke over the course of two or three early-morning Skype interviews, I was heartened to find another researcher interested in attention during gambling. I accepted a graduate-level position in Luke’s new lab, and began planning my return to Vancouver.

My graduate research subsequently looked at the kind of attentional state I had witnessed in that little casino. Earlier academics had called this state “Flow”, or being “in the zone”, and many had drawn parallels with clinically-relevant dissociation. As it turns out, people who have these kinds of immersive gambling experiences are at significantly higher risk of experiencing gambling problems. In other words, before we can fully understand problem gambling, we have to understand the causes and consequences of gambling immersion.

In my Doctoral training, I worked to characterize the behavioural and psychophysiological effects of slot machine immersion. I showed that the degree of immersion individuals report after gambling on a slot machine depends on specific features of the slot machine, and the parts of the screen gamblers look at. In other experiments, I investigated immersion using impedance cardiography and pupillometry. This provided further insight into how immersion relates to the effects of modern slot machines, and the high rate of gambling problems associated with them.

In my current role as a CIHR Postdoctoral Fellow at Concordia University, I work under Drs. Sylvia Kairouz and Martin French in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology. My projects seek to develop and apply supervised machine learning algorithms in online gambling platforms for the purpose of identifying users who are experiencing moderate-to-severe levels of gambling related harm. With effective identification of at-risk users in online gambling platforms, gambling operators will be better able to provide individualized support, prevent worsening gambling problems, and curtail the number of promotional materials delivered to people who are experiencing gambling problems.

What comes next? Humans are going to continue developing new and addictive digital products like slot machines, smartphones, and video games. As these product emerge, we will need a new breed of risk model that understands behavioural addiction, responds promptly to signs of trouble, and ultimately prevents user harm. I want to discover what is needed to create and maintain those models.

If you have a cool idea to improve our understanding of addictive digital products, get in touch! I’m always eager to lend a hand!