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Vice-President (Research)
Penny Pexman
Contact: vpr@uwo.ca
Administrative Support: Kristina Veres, Executive Specialist to the Vice-President (Research)
Speaking and Engagement Requests
Biography
Penny Pexman is Vice-President (Research) and Professor of Psychology at 深夜福利站.
As Vice-President (Research), Penny provides strategic leadership for all aspects of research and innovation across the university. Since assuming her role in 2023, she has driven substantial growth in external research funding at 深夜福利站. She has also expanded supports for interdisciplinary scholarship, core research facilities and early career researchers. A strong advocate for collaboration and partnering for research impact, Penny has forged new international and industry partnerships for 深夜福利站.
Prior to assuming her role at 深夜福利站, Penny spent 25 years at the University of Calgary, where she served in research leadership roles including Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts and Associate Vice-President (Research).
Penny’s research expertise is in cognitive development, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. In broad terms, she is interested in how we derive meaning from language, how those processes are acquired and how they are changed by experience. She has published more than 200 journal articles and book chapters on those topics. For almost three decades, her work has been continuously funded by two of Canada’s federal funding councils: the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), including NSERC’s prestigious Discovery Accelerator Supplement.
She is an elected fellow of the ; the ; the ; and the . She has been honoured with nine awards for mentorship and teaching excellence. In 2026, Penny received the Donald O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science from the Canadian Psychological Association. In the same year, she also received the Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award from the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science.
Penny has served on numerous committees and adjudication panels for funding organizations, including as Chair of NSERC’s Biological Systems and Functions Grants panel and of the NSERC Banting Postdoctoral Fellows Selection Committee. She was Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology and Associate Editor of Journal of Memory and Language. Penny is past President of the ; past Governing Board Chair for the ; and co-founder of . Presently, she serves on Governing Boards for ; ; the International ; and , Canada’s Particle Accelerator Centre.