Our Faculty

Whether in the classroom or in the lab, what I love most about teaching is witnessing students connect with psychology - whether they have found a topic that is their passion, are feeling the satisfaction of having worked through a difficult challenge, or have stopped by my office to chat about research.

Dr. Serena George (she/her) holds a BA, MEd, and PhD. She is a counselling practitioner who works from a trauma-informed lens to empower and connect with others in their healing journeys. Dr. George is a Registered Clinical Counsellor with BCACC and a Canadian Certified Counsellor with the CCPA. She currently works as a Sessional Faculty Member (Department of Psychology) and Open Learning Faculty Member (School of Education) at Thompson Rivers University.

My primary research aims are to provide further understanding of the factors that affect cognitive and visuomotor function across healthy aging populations and in disease (such as mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease and others), by implementing a variety of behavioural and brain imaging techniques.

My long-term research goal is to determine how skilled hand and mouth movements are organized in the human brain. I am especially interested in how these movements and their underlying neural substrates arose through evolution, are established during development, and breakdown in various neurological disorders. I use 3D linear kinematics, high-speed frame-by-frame video analyses, and more recently functional neuroimaging to characterize the neural and behavioural architecture of skilled hand and mouth movements in human and non-human species

Whether in the classroom or in the lab, what I love most about teaching is witnessing students connect with psychology - whether they have found a topic that is their passion, are feeling the satisfaction of having worked through a difficult challenge, or have stopped by my office to chat about research.

My research is designed to facilitate children's (and other witness') participation in the justice system by better understanding how witnesses remember and report their experiences. I conduct basic laboratory experiments on memory and social behaviours, as well as field research on the experiences of children who have been victims of and/or witnesses to crime. I am also interested in how adults perceive children¹s reports and how we can improve children's ability to provide evidence.