Dr. Lucy Akehurst | University of Portsmouth, UK
Dr. Akehurst’s research involves liaison with legal professionals, police officers and social workers. She has investigated numerous issues regarding the detection of deception including nonverbal cues to deceit, the analysis and application of Criteria-Based Content Analysis and the perceptions of people with regard to cues to deceit. Dr. Akehurst took a two-year PostDoc Research Associate post at the University of Wales, Swansea working on a Leverhulme Trust funded project entitled, ‘The influence of sleep loss, personality and confidence on eyewitness suggestibility’. Dr. Akehurst is currently working on projects including (i) the detection of malingering in the medico-legal setting, (ii) cognitive load as experienced by investigiative interviewers and the effect of cognitive load on interviewers’ performance (with Pam Hanway), (iii) training police officers to self-assess their investigative interviews with vulnerable witnesses to mitigate against skills fade and (iv) interviewing to elicit accurate information from pre-school aged children (with Mikaela Magnusson). She is the Head of the Department of Psychology and a Reader in Psychology and Law.
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Dr. Brian Cutler | Ontario Tech University, CA
For more than 30 years Dr. Cutler has held faculty and academic administrative positions at Florida International University (1987-2002), the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (2002-2008), and Ontario Tech University (2008-present).
In his roles as a university professor, Dr. Cutler has taught a variety of psychology and criminology courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels and has supervised undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students in research. Dr. Cutler also has taught continuing legal education workshops in his areas of expertise. For 19 years Dr. Cutler served in the roles of Department Chair, Associate Dean, and Interim Dean. In these capacities, he has held leadership roles in faculty and staff affairs, university planning, budget management, academic program development, and fund-raising.
Since 1983, Dr. Cutler has conducted research on various forensic and social psychology topics. He has active research programs on eyewitness memory, interrogations, and police psychology, from social and cognitive psychological perspectives. Dr. Cutler has held research grants from the National Science Foundation of the United States and Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Dr. Cutler’s publications include Editor or Author of The APA Handbook of Forensic Psychology, the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Law, Reform of Eyewitness Identification Procedures, Conviction of the Innocent: Lessons from Psychological Research, and five other books. He is also an author of more than 25 book chapters and 65 peer-reviewed articles in psychology, law, and interdisciplinary journals, 25 articles in professional newsletters. Dr. Cutler has given more than 100 professional conferences and universities.
Dr. Cutler has had active collaborations with psychology, criminology, law, sociology, and computer science researchers from universities in the U.S., Canada, England, Germany, and Australia and the National Center for State Courts in the U.S. Some of his works have been translated into the German, Japanese, and Korean languages.
Dr. Cutler is active in professional associations as well. He served as President of the American Psychology-Law Society (Division 41 of the American Psychological Association) and Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Law and Human Behavior. He served as Division 41 Council Representative for the American Psychological Association and is an advisor to APA’s Amicus Brief program. Dr. Cutler is a Distinguished Member of the American Psychology-Law Society and Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
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Dr. Lisa Dufraimont | Osgoode Hall Law School, CA
Professor Lisa Dufraimont joined Osgoode Hall Law School in July 2015. She teaches and conducts research in the areas of criminal law and procedure and evidence. Prior to joining Osgoode, Professor Dufraimont held a faculty position at the Queen’s University Faculty of Law, where she began teaching as an Assistant Professor in 2006, became an Associate Professor in 2012, and served as Acting Associate Dean (Academic) for the first half of 2015. She earned her JD from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and was awarded both the Gold Medal and the Dean’s Key. She also holds an LLM and JSD from Yale University. She served as law clerk to the Honourable Justices Catzman, Carthy, Laskin and Rosenberg at the Court of Appeal for Ontario and was admitted to the Bar of Ontario in 2003.
Professor Dufraimont has published extensively on subjects related to criminal law and evidence, with a particular focus on the jury system and the psychological aspect of procedural and evidentiary rules. Her work has appeared in edited collections and in leading law journals including the McGill Law Journal, the Queen’s Law Journal, the UBC Law Review, the Supreme Court Law Review, the Canadian Criminal Law Review and the Criminal Law Quarterly. She was Co-Investigator on a SSHRC-funded psycho-legal research project investigating the effects of Canadian jury pattern jury instructions on the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
She is co-author of Evidence: Principles and Problems, 10th ed. (with Delisle, Stuart & Tanovich, 2012) and Canadian Evidence Law in a Nutshell, 3rd ed. (with Delisle, 2009). She is Associate Editor of the Criminal Reports and a regular contributor to the National Judicial Institute’s Criminal Essentials Eletter, which is distributed monthly to about 1000 Canadian judges.
Professor Dufraimont presents regularly at legal and judicial education seminars. While at Queen’s, she received the Law Students’ Society Teaching Excellence Award.
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Dr. Mariane Gazaille | Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, CA
Dr. Gazaille is a professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. She received her M.S.c in Education from University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières (Canada) and her Ph.D. in Education from University of Sherbrooke (Quebec, Canada). Dr. Gazaille’s research interests include teacher presence, non-verbal communication in teaching / non-verbal communication, ICT and L2 teaching-learning, and professional representation. Dr. Gazaille is the head of the Department of Modern Languages and Translation.
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Dr. Andrew M. Smith | Iowa State University, US
Dr. Smith is an Assistant Professor in Quantitative Psychology at Iowa State University where he is affiliated with both the Cognitive Psychology program and the Psychology and Law Research group. Along with Distinguished Professor Gary L. Wells, Dr. Smith is the Co-PI of the Psychology and Law Research Lab. Dr. Smith’s research examines the diagnostic accuracy and reliability of eyewitness identification procedures. In addition, he is interested in the quantification of diagnostic accuracy and in construct validity as it relates to measuring memory performance.