Penny Pexman is Vice-President (Research) and Professor of Psychology at Western. She was appointed in 2023, having previously spent 25 years at the University of Calgary, where she served in research leadership roles including Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts and Associate Vice-President (Research). Penny has served on numerous committees and adjudication panels for funding organizations, including as Chair of NSERC’s Biological Systems and Functions panel and of the NSERC Banting Selection Committee. She was Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology and Associate Editor of Journal of Memory and Language. She is past President of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science, past Governing Board Chair for the Psychonomic Society, a current member of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society, and co-founder of Women in Cognitive Science - Canada.

Penny’s research expertise is in cognitive development, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. In broad terms, she is interested in how we derive meaning from language, how those processes are acquired, and how those processes are changed by experience. She has published more than 200 journal articles and book chapters on those topics. For almost three decades, her work has been continuously funded by both SSHRC and NSERC, including NSERC’s prestigious Discovery Accelerator Supplement. She is an elected fellow of several societies, including the Canadian Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science and has been honoured with nine awards for mentorship and teaching excellence.