Leslie Cameron

Leslie Cameron teaches courses in the Department of Psychological Science at Carthage, and regularly involves Carthage students in her research. She and her students are currently researching the effect of Covid-19 on sense of smell, the effects of pregnancy on the sense of smell, memory for odors, inhomogeneities in processing information across the visual field, and the latency of human eye movements. She has also studied humor development and understandings of irony and sarcasm among college students.

Prof. Cameron earned her B.A. with distinction from McGill University in Montreal, Canada; her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester; and a Certificat Supérieur and Diplôme de Phonétique Appliquée à la Langue Française from the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France. Before coming to Carthage, she was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research associate and adjunct professor at New York University and a visiting assistant professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She was awarded a National Research Service Award postdoctoral fellowship and a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at NYU.

As a Wagner Teaching Fellow Prof. Cameron is using a Decoding the Disciplines approach, in conjunction with eye-movement recording, to better understand what experts do when they “read” graphs in order to help elucidate the process and teach it more effectively to students. She has conducted much of this research with “students as partners” and recently published a reflection with her students on the challenges faced in faculty-student partnerships.

Prof. Cameron is a member of several research teams that publish in a number of journals, such as Chemical Senses, Chemosensory Perception, Frontiers in Psychology, and Vision Research. She regularly presents at the Chemical Senses and Vision Sciences annual meetings and at colleges and universities.

She plays squash competitively and is an advocate for biking as a mode of transportation.

Media Mentions:

Carthage’s effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus with smell testing was featured in this article (The Daily Beast, August 16, 2020) and Prof. Cameron was interviewed about olfaction and Covid-19 by Gregory Berg on WGTD.

Super Awesome Science Show: Smells of the season
Professor Cameron discusses smell and how we detect and recognize odors throughout life that can equate with the festive season. (Global News, December 25, 2018)