Our People
Current Members
Sabina Kleitman
Associate Professor
Eugene Aidman
Adjunct Associate Professor
Lazar Stankov
Honorary Professor
Lazar is an emeritus professor at the University of Sydney, where he taught for over thirty years. He received his BA from the University of Belgrade and his PhD from the University of Denver. He is known for his research on intelligence, including studies on the link between political ideology and intelligence, the existence of emotional intelligence, and the psychology of terrorism.
Iain Crossing
PhD Candidate, Research Assistant
Iain is a PhD candidate and Registered Psychologist with 22 years’ experience in the measurement, analysis, and development of organisations and the people within them. Iain’s international work with business leaders from different cultures in Australia, Asia, the UK, and the USA motivated his current PhD research into culture and cultural differences in leadership and how they relate to leadership diversity in the workplace. Iain’s research investigates gender and cultural differences in the assumptions, expectations, and self-beliefs that influence leadership and the motivation-to-lead. Specifically, his studies explore how family perfectionism influences decision-making, perfectionism, and self-beliefs – and how these in turn influence leadership confidence and the different motivations one might have for wanting to become a leader.
Karina Mak
PhD Candidate, Research Assistant
Karina is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, Australia and a Registered Psychologist with 10 years’ industry experience. In 2016, she was one of eight Go-8 students selected to be part of the inaugural Westpac STEM PhD Program. She previously worked in analytics and user experience for Westpac Consumer Bank and examined risk culture for Group Audit. Karina has also consulted in the private sector and spent several years in NSW government working in psychometric testing and assessment for recruitment and development purposes. Her research interests include the impostor phenomenon, self-beliefs, wellbeing and psychometric assessment in organisational psychology.
Matthew Blanchard
PhD Candidate, Research Assistant
Matt is a current PhD candidate with a passion for decision-making and data analysis. His research aims to understand the benefits and harms associated with working in a group. Matt is also working on a range of CODES projects involving simulation-based assessment, adaptability, resilience, and COVID-19.
Marvin Law
PhD Candidate, Research Assistant
Marvin is a PhD candidate and is one of 17 recipients of the national Westpac Future Leaders Scholarship in 2018. He has a strong passion for data and believes it is the key to discovering patterns in behaviour and to ultimately predict and improve life outcomes. Marvin has a background in both academia and industry, presenting at national conferences, publishing empirically validated papers in high impact journals as well as leading and delivering research projects in market research. For his PhD, he is examining metacognition and cognition’s roles in predicting real life outcomes, particularly on trait uncertainty.
Benjamin Ni
PhD Candidate
Ben completed his Honours with the CODES lab in 2020. In 2018, he started his internship with the lab where he did behavioural coding on driving and communication strategies from driving simulation data, and conducted a literature review on biomarkers of decision making. His research interests include perfectionism and its relationships to performance and well-being. His current research is examining risk behaviour and moral decision making.
Dayna Fullerton
Research Assistant
Dayna completed her Honours with the CODES Lab in 2019, where she conducted research investigating mental resilience in university students, developing and testing a synergistic model examining the relationships between traits, responses to stressors, and positive outcomes. She is now completing a Master of Applied Positive Psychology and is involved in a range of projects in the lab surrounding resilience and COVID-19. Her research interests include well-being, self-beliefs, personality theories, and psychometric assessment.
Lisa Zhang
Research Assistant
Lisa was a senior research assistant at CODES. She completed her Honours project in 2018 under the supervision of A/Prof Kleitman. She was involved in multiple projects on resilience, adaptability, and COVID-19. Her research interests included decision-making, behavioural science, and sustainability. Lisa is currently in the UK after completing her MSc in Behaviour Change at UCL.
Fenella Palanca
Research Assistant
Associates & External Collaborators
- Prof Valerie Thompson, the University of Saskatchewan
- A/Prof Rakefet Ackerman, Israel Institute of Technology
- Prof Asher Koriat, University of Haifa
Past Affiliates
- Dr Simon A. Jackson, Honorary Research Fellow
- Samuel Jacobson, Former Research Assistant
- James Forner, Former Summer Intern
- Yixin Jiang, Former PhD Student
- Adrian Chiu, Former Talented Student Program
- Farzana Shabnam, Former HCT Summer Research Scholarship Intern
- Christopher Soto, Former Honours Student
- Isaac Sabel, Former Honours Student
- Daniel Clopatofsky Sanchez, Former Intern
- Andrew Efthymiou, Former Honours Student