2020 Richard C. Tees Distinguished Leadership Award Winner: Dr. Jean Saint-Aubin

Professor Jean Saint-Aubin has a very impressive profile of research excellence and dedicated service to the CSBBCS and the broader Psychological community. He is a recognized expert on human memory, a dedicated advisor to students, and he has served as CSBBCS Past President, CPA Science Director, CJEP Associate Editor, Co-chair of the NSERC Discovery Grants Committee, and Past Department Head at Moncton.  

Jean is an internationally-recognized authority on human memory whose work presents a rigorous and insightful picture of human memory and its interactions with attention, reading, language, and perception. He has published 78 articles in many of the discipline’s most prestigious journals including Psychological Science, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. His work is very-well cited (2400 citations) and has been supported by uninterrupted funding from NSERC since 2001. Jean was also awarded the distinction of an NSERC Discovery Accelerator Supplement that is granted to “a small group of outstanding researchers who have a well-established research program, and who show strong potential to become international leaders in their respective area of research.”

Jean has been a long-time, dedicated member of CSBBCS since 1992. He has given 29 CSBBCS presentations at 18 different CSBBCS meetings. Jean has served as CSBBCS President-Elect 2013-2014, President, 2014-2016, and Past President, 2016-2017. In that time, he helped oversee several successful CSBBCS meetings and launched new society initiatives including the introduction of CSBBCS Fellows. Jean has also played a cross-society role representing and promoting CSBBCS’s interests as Scientific Director on the Canadian Psychological Association’s (CPA) Board of Directors, CPA’s Chair of the Scientific Affairs Committee, and a Member of CPA’s Publications Committee that oversees the administration and advancement of our society’s journal (Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology). Jean is currently serving a 5-year term as Associate Editor of CJEP. Prior to his term as Associate Editor, he served as a member of the CJEP’s Editorial Board (2005-2018) and contributed as a Guest Editor for one issue in 2015.

Jean also has a long history of service at NSERC including roles as Section Chair of Discovery Grant Selection Committee (2019-2021), Member of Discovery Grant Selection Committee (2018-2019), Member of Research Tool and Instruments Selection Committee (2017-2018), Section Chair of Discovery Grant Selection Committee (2011-2012), and Member of Discovery Grant Selection Committee (2008-2011).

Finally, but no less importantly, Jean has been an impressive mentor who has supervised 25 Graduate theses, 33 Honours theses, 2 Post-docs and 25 NSERC USRA projects. But, his mentorship extends beyond his own institution: he has contributed in substantial ways to student training at McMaster University and Dalhousie University where he is an Adjunct Professor.