Happy Holidays, fellow listeners! Lauren Girouard-Hallam joins me on the show as we discuss Santa's powers based on the holiday hit famously recorded by Gene Autry "Up on the Housetop" in the scope of psychology of children's belief in them. And of course, we have some fun as we tease out what kind of scientist(s) would Santa Claus would be! More information about Lauren below.

Lauren Girouard-Hallam, MA, MS, (she/her) is a fourth year doctoral candidate at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience and her Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from Furman University in 2017 and then moved to New York City to pursue her Master of Arts in Drama Therapy, an arts-based applied counseling degree, which she earned from NYU in 2019. She also earned a Master of Science in Experimental Psychology from U of L in 2021. Her current research investigates how 3-12 year old children think about and learn from novel technologies from Siri and Alexa to search engines and the internet at large. Lauren can also be found teaching labs for graduate level statistics courses, serving as chair for the American Psychological Association’s Science Student Council, and co-running Louisville Kentucky’s chapter of R-Ladies, a community initiative designed to bring coding skill-building opportunities to gender minority individuals inside and outside of the academy. Lauren is also this year’s ComSciCon National Flagship Conference Programming Committee & Logistics Committee liaison. When not engaging in scholarship, Lauren is most at home when curled up with her Belgian shepherd mix Molly, her wife Madison, and an excellent art-house horror film.

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