Graduate Laboratory Research Training and Mentoring
Jim Townsend is the primary advisor for several graduate students in the areas of Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Science and on the faculty committees or serving as co-advisor for several students in Clinical Science. Clinical science graduate students and postdoctoral fellows regularly attend reading groups on quantitative modeling held in the Townsend Laboratory of Mathematical Psychology.
Townsend has been training students and postdocs since 1966, both as major advisor and co-advisor. His numerous Ph.D.s and postdoctoral fellows have assumed positions in academia and industry.
One of his early Ph.D.s, F. Gregory Ashby, is a leading figure in mathematical modeling, especially categorization and, more lately, in modeling neuropsychological processes in Parkinson's and Alzheimer's syndrome. He is currently Professor of Psychology at University of California, Santa Barbara.
A former postdoctoral fellow from the Townsend lab is Dr. Michael Wenger, Associate Professor of Psychology at Pennsylvania State University. He won the APA Young Investigator Award and is currently a Co-PI with Townsend on a major NIMH research grant on modeling configurality and gestalt perception.
A recent postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Ami Eidels, is now a lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Newcastle. Dr. Eidels is also Co-PI of the Newcastle Cognition Lab.
Dr. Robin Thomas earned her Ph.D. with Townsend in the mid-90s, won the APA Young Investigator Award, and is now Associate Professor of Psychology at Miami University, Ohio.
Dr. Jesse Spencer-Smith, a recent Ph.D., won a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the famed Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois and has accepted a position in the Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Mario Fific, another recent Ph.D., completed a postdoctoral research position with Dr. Robert Nosofsky at Indiana University. Dr. Fific is currently a research scientist at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development.