Dr. Cristina Atance

Biography

Dr. Cristina Atance is the Director of the Childhood Cognition and Learning Laboratory and is a Full Professor of Psychology at the University of Ottawa. She is also a Co-Director of a new and innovative research lab/space – the University of Ottawa “Living Lab” – at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa. Dr. Atance completed her Bachelor of Science in Psychology at the University of Toronto in 1996 and received her PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2001. She then completed a two-year post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Washington before returning to Canada in 2003 to begin a faculty position at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Atance has broad research interests within the domain of cognitive development/children’s thinking but is especially intrigued by their memory and thought about the future, and their perspective-taking and executive functioning skills. Her research has been funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Government of Ontario. Although Dr. Atance likes to think she knows a lot about how children think, her creative, silly, and downright unpredictable two sons remind her that she does not! When she is not trying to figure them out (or working), she likes to spend time outdoors doing just about anything active.