ARAC is brimming with pride for to our esteemed team members, DR. KIRI STAUCH & DR. IAN JONES on their remarkable achievement of earning PH.D. degrees! Your dedication, hard work, and unwavering commitment to your research contributes immensely to our team and the academic community at large. We have every confidence that you will continue to excel and make significant contributions to your respective fields.
DR. KIRI STAUCH - Kiri’s degree is in Experimental Psychology with a concentration in Comparative-Neurobiology Psychology along with a Quantitative Concentration and Graduate Certificate in Neuroscience. She also earned a Master of Science in Psychology from Oklahoma State University and a Master of Science in Primate Behavior and Ecology from Central Washington University. Her Bachelor of Arts is in Anthropology and Psychology from Illinois Wesleyan University. Her DISSERTATION is titled, "A Measurement of the Effects of an Acute Canine Therapy Session on Salivary Cortisol and Oxytocin Levels in College Students." Her dissertation was conducted in collaboration with Oklahoma State University's therapy dog program, Pete's Pet Posse. She examined the benefits of a therapy dog session on students' perceived stress levels and physiological stress levels. While at Oklahoma State University,she was awarded the Department of Psychology Experimental Psychology Research and Scholarship award along with the Psychology Department Dr. David G. Thomas Outstanding Graduate Student Scholarship Award.
DR. IAN JONES - Ian has a Ph.D. in experimental psychology with a concentration in social and cognitive psychology and a quantitative certificate. For his DISSERTATION, he used honeybees as a model organism to demonstrate that a lesser known theory called “perceptual control theory” offers a better understanding of how and why behaviors occur than other theories of behavior. Perceptual control theory has been applied to humans but is said to be applicable to any living perceptually aware organism, so he applied it to research on learning and discrimination experiments with honeybees. Ian was awarded the 2022 Experimental Programs Research and Scholarly Activity award. He has received several awards for posters at conference presentations, has authored/co-authored roughly 12 articles during his time at OSU, with several more under review currently and being prepared for submission.
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