Rate My Professor Kerry Chalmers

Kerry Chalmers is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia, within the College of Engineering, Science and Environment. She holds a PhD and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours), both from the University of Queensland. Chalmers' academic career began with a Lectureship at the Australian National University in 1998, followed by a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland from 1999 to 2001. She joined the University of Newcastle in 2001 as a Lecturer, advancing to Senior Lecturer from 2006 to 2016, Associate Professor from 2017 to 2020, and now serves in her current honorary position.

Her research interests center on memory, cognition, and cognitive development. Chalmers co-authored the book Thinking about Human Memory (2016) with M.S. Humphreys, which analyzes memory tasks through considerations of cues, targets, learning opportunities, discrimination challenges, and control processes. Key publications include Recognition memory: The probe, the returned signal, and the decision (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2024, with Humphreys and Hockley); Retrieval practice via corrective feedback: is learning better for targets in an expected or surprising sense? (Memory, 2021, with Burt et al.); The relationship between early life stress and working memory in adulthood: A systematic review and meta-analysis (Memory, 2019, with Goodman and Freeman); A Comparison of Single and Multi-Test Working Memory Assessments in Predicting Academic Achievement in Children (Journal of Psychology, 2018, with Freeman); Metacognitive monitoring of working memory performance and its relationship to academic achievement in Grade 4 children (Learning and Individual Differences, 2017, with Freeman and Karayanidis); and studies on group singing's impact on health-related quality of life in Parkinson’s disease (Health Psychology, 2016) and music training's mnemonic effects in Alzheimer’s dementia (Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 2016). She has supervised PhD theses, including in clinical psychology.