Faculty and Staff
Nicole Conrad
Professor
Phone: 902-420-5080
Office: MS 301
Email: nicole.conrad@smu.ca
Dr. Conrad is Professor and Chairperson of the Psychology Department at Saint Mary’s University and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Dalhousie University. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Reading Research, and a member of the Executive Board for the Society of Scientific Study of Reading. She is a multi-award winning instructor, teaching courses across the undergraduate curriculum including Introduction to Memory, Honours Seminar, and a fourth year Special Topics course on the Science of Reading. Dr. Conrad also serves as a long-standing Trustee for the SMUFU Health & Wellness Trust.
Dr. Conrad is a literacy researcher. She holds an undergraduate degree in Psychology from Saint Mary’s University (yes, she is a proud alum!) and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from McMaster University. Dr. Conrad’s research is generally focused on how children learn to read. Her research career began with studying basic memory processes and how memory works and grew to examine how memory is involved in reading acquisition – how do children encode, store, and efficiently retrieve information about words to facilitate subsequent reading and writing. These questions are addressed in many different ways, but current focus is on how children learn about orthography – the letter or symbols used to represent the sounds of a language – and use this information to become better readers and spellers. Her current research funded by the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada examines how spelling instruction and practice facilitates learning to read.