Endowment Initiatives & Awards

The Quinn Memorial Endowment allows the Department of Psychology to fund student initiatives that aim to strengthen and support the research activities of our undergraduate majors and graduate students.

Research Assistantship Awards

Quinn Research Assistantship Awards | Undergraduate

These Quinn Research Assistantship (QRA) awards are meant to stimulate our undergraduate students’ interest in research in psychology. They are also meant to encourage undergraduate students to undertake graduate studies and pursue a research career. If students are interested in gaining research experience in an academic setting, these awards can provide them with financial support. The number of awards available each year will vary.

If you are interested in this award you must first contact a UBC Psychology faculty member. If the faculty member agrees to nominate you for this award, each of you must complete a Quinn Research Assistantship form (student and supervisor). If eligible, apply first to the NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Awards (NSERC USRA) program. You may normally receive funding once from only one of these research programs but in exceptional circumstances, a second award may be approved.

Application forms, guidelines, and eligibility requirements can be found under Quinn Undergraduate Research Assistantship on UBC Psychology’s website.

Travel Awards

The Quinn Research Travel Grant | Undergraduate

This program enables our undergraduates per year to present their work at major research conferences (e.g. Association for Psychological Science, Canadian Psychological Association, Psychonomics, Society for Neuroscience) or to pursue interesting research problems that cannot be tackled here. For instance, Sabrina Chow, a student of Professor Emeritus Peter Suedfeld, traveled to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC to enrich her Honours project on the persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Nazi Germany. Eligible students include BA and BSc Psychology majors, as well as their counterparts in the Cognitive Systems program. UBC Psychology  is proud to have over 200 Majors who are actively involved in all areas of psychological research and whose work is supervised by one or more faculty members. Though the latter are typically very supportive of their graduate students and postdocs (financially as well as spiritually), they rarely have enough extra funds available to cover research-related travel costs for their most deserving undergraduate students.

The Quinn Research Travel Grant Application Form (MS Word)

Please review the Quinn Research Travel Grant Guidelines (MS Word) before applying.


The Quinn Exchange Fellowship | Graduate

This program enables our graduate students to visit and work in comparable research labs at major universities, anywhere in the world, for up to a year, provided that similarly talented students from those same labs come here to study and work with us, for about the same amount of time and under comparable conditions. Given that the classmates of today are the colleagues of tomorrow, this exchange program helps our graduate students build interpersonal bridges and acquire new scientific skills and know-how which they can later share students and faculty here at home. At the same time, our students serve as excellent ambassadors not only for UBC, but also for the Faculty of Arts and the Department of Psychology at UBC. The initial exchange took place in 2006 between Katie Yoshida, a doctoral student in our developmental program (supervised by Professor Janet Werker), and Naoto Yamane, a student of language development at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Wako, Japan. Subsequent QXFs have involved students from Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States who temporarily “swapped” places with our own students.

Quinn Exchange Fellowships Application Form (PDF) | Guidelines (PDF)