the team.
who we are
Dr. Richard Koestner
Lab Director
Richard Koestner is a professor of Psychology at McGill University where he has conducted research on human motivation for 25 years. Richard received his PhD from the University of Rochester where he worked with Ed Deci and Richard Ryan on research related to self-determination theory. He also worked with Miron Zuckerman on research related to personality. He subsequently completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University and Boston University where he worked with David McClelland on research related to implicit motives. Richard has published over 250 scientific articles and his recent work focuses on the importance of autonomy in the effective pursuit of personal goals. Twenty of Richard's PhD students have successfully graduated with PhD's. Richard received the 2007 Canadian Psychological Association award for excellence in teaching and training. He subsequently won Principal's Prize for excellence in teaching from McGill University (2008).
Élodie Audet
PhD Candidate
Élodie is in her fourth year of graduate studies in the Clinical Psychology program. Under the supervision of Dr. Richard Koestner, she is pursuing research examining how environments and social interactions impact the motivational processes behind individuals’ regulation and integration of emotional experiences and how this relates to psychological health and personal goal pursuits. She hopes to expand psychological services and evidence-based care to marginalized groups, especially those that have lived through traumatic events, and contribute to the psychological well-being of our communities. She is also the Lead Program Manager of the Ukrainian Aid Initiative, launched by the Professor Virginian I. Douglas Centre for Clinical Psychology in collaboration with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress-Montreal and the Montreal Branch of the Ukrainian National Federation, a project providing professional free-of-charge mental health support (e.g., individual and family therapy) and specifically modified mindfulness and trauma-informed activities groups for Ukrainian newcomers.
Helen Thai
PhD Candidate
Helen is in her fourth year of graduate studies in the Clinical Psychology program at McGill University, under the co-supervision of Drs. Martin Lepage, Gillian O’Driscoll, and Richard Koestner. She obtained a BA in Honours Psychology (2020) and a BComm in Marketing from the Sprott School of Business (2017) at Carleton University. Helen is interested in conducting patient-oriented research among people living with severe mental illness. Her research focuses on the role of motivation in treatment engagement and functional recovery outcomes in schizophrenia-spectrum and psychotic disorders.
Xiaoyan Fang
PhD Student
Xiaoyan is in her third year of graduate studies in the Clinical Psychology program at McGill University. She completed her Bachelor of Arts Honours Psychology degree in 2018 at McGill. Her research interest on understanding how one’s psychological well-being is affected by their socio-cultural identity and the intergroup context they live in has grown further as she worked in an intergroup laboratory experiment at McGill (under supervision of Dr. Taylor, Dr. Kachanoff and Dr. Kteily) and as a community researcher at the Black Community Resource Centre (BCRC) in Montreal after graduating from McGill. Under the supervision of Dr. Richard Koestner, she hopes to foster deep connections with community through conducting community-driven and community-based research examining the individual and systemic dynamics which impact the psychological well-being and mental health outcomes of marginalized and minority communities.
Ben Thomas
PhD Student
Ben obtained his B.A. (Honours) in Psychology from McGill University in 2022, where he completed two honours theses for Dr. Richard Koestner. The first investigated the reliability of the measure of "good life coherence" - the extent to which individuals perceive their life as coherent with their own personal vision of the good life - and found several associations with other well-being indicators such as goal progress and subjective well-being. The thesis was eventually published in The Journal of Happiness Studies. His second project focused on good life coherence and its relationship with depression during the COVID-19 pandemic.
John Davids
PhD Student
John is a first year student in the Experimental Psychology program at McGill University. John has a background in Political Science having attained his Bachelor's degree from Carleton University (2016) and his Master's degree from York University (2019). John also served as the Research Coordinator at the Black Community Resource Centre where he conducted several studies on the well-being and vitality of Quebec's English-speaking Black population. In this program, he aims to research and study the sense of belonging and the political engagement of minority populations across Quebec and Canada.
James Avery
James is a first-year clinical psychology student at McGill University, where he also completed his B.A. (Honours) in Psychology. Before returning to McGill, James worked as a research coordinator for a forensic psychology lab, researching culturally safe care for people with mental health and substance use needs. In his graduate studies, he seeks to apply lessons from this work by investigating how diverse cultural values affect people's goals, how they pursue said goals, and how that affects their mental health.
PhD Student