It gives me great pleasure to introduce our new Digital Associate Editor, Kimele Persaud, who joined our team a few weeks ago.

Welcome, Kimele, great to have you.

Kimele is currently a graduate student in Psychology at Rutgers University, where she works with Dr. Pernille Hemmer on computational models of memory.

Kimele started out as a double major in nursing and psychology. Fortunately for our discipline, she realized during her first day of nursing clinical rotations that nursing was not for her. She therefore instead earned a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Psychology, and Psychology only, from Delaware State University.

Her current work involves applying computational methods to understand the influence of real-world knowledge and expectations on visual working and long-term memory. Her PhD has been supported by a prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

By way of personal background, Kimele is originally from New Jersey and she loves her home state so much that she returned to Rutgers to pursue her PhD. Loving New Jersey is an understandable affliction—after all, the Roxey Ballet has put on a production called I love New Jersey:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsidmlibfC0]

Kimele’s Psychonomics bio page can be found here. In addition, I asked Kimele for a bit more background information about herself, and here is what she told me:

“I live at home with my husband, Davon, who I married two months before joining the Priors and Memory Lab of Professor Pernille Hemmer (just thought I’d get that out of the way). I was the very first graduate student in this lab.

Outside of research, my hobbies include performing liturgical dance at church and writing Christian romance novels.

I have a serious self-diagnosed condition called ‘Addicted to Busy’. By day I can be found chasing after undergraduates (participants and RAs included) in the lab, and by night I can be found chasing after my beautiful one year old daughter, Shayla, who has become the subject of every home adapted developmental study I could think of. By the way, hats off to those developmental psychologists; collecting toddler data is hard work! Although my schedule has become quite a juggling act, I wouldn’t trade it for the world!”

Welcome to the team, Kimele!

Stand by for Kimele’s first post tomorrow.