Meet the IIU's Behavioural Science Fellow: Can Fenerci

Can is a Behavioural Science Fellow embedded within Employment and Social Development Canada. His work focuses on improving the efficiency of government processes and reducing barriers to service access.

He completed his PhD in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at McGill University, where he led studies on human memory in aging using behavioural and neuroimaging experiments. Prior to joining the Impact and Innovation Unit, Can was a Behavioural Scientist at Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada where he worked on applying behavioural insights to improve client satisfaction, service/program delivery, and uptake.

Based on your skills and past experience, what unique perspectives do you bring to this work?

My background is in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience – with my doctoral work examining age-related changes in cognitive processes. As a result, considerations of diverse perspectives, limitations, and demographic differences are top of the mind for me while describing problems and designing solutions. This perspective not only allows me to design interventions, processes, and policies that are inclusive and tailored to different demographic needs but also bring a nuanced understanding of how individual, social, and structural factors interact to influence behaviour. In addition, having previously worked as a Behavioural Scientist in the government, I am well aware of the promise of but also the challenges with the bridge between academia and policy.

What attracted you to apply to the Fellowship program?

The opportunity to leverage my training and the skills I have honed to inform and design policies/processes that benefit folks is what has attracted me to apply to the Fellowship program. The bonus was the privilege to work alongside and learn from other Impact Canada experts with various backgrounds and areas of expertise.

In what way do you believe the application of behavioural science can effectively support the response to some of the challenges we face as a society?

How individuals decide and act on these decisions constitute the root of several problems we face today. In addition, government policies and processes are created to serve people who have their own set of biases and limits around how they process information. In turn, behavioural science offers evidence based insights into to why these decisions are made and acted on as well as providing tools and methods to understand and challenge these decisions. In this way, behavioural science and its tools are uniquely positioned to make policies more effective, and make sure that these policies are not only designed for individuals but done so effectively. As a result, behavioral insights can simplify processes, improve communication, and make government services more accessible.

Can you share an outcome from your past research(es) that has made you proud?

My doctoral work leveraged new methods to address a seemingly old question of how aging affects the way we remember our past experiences. Specifically, I used Natural Language Processing to examine how younger and older adults remember a naturalistic event, balancing the control of lab-based experiments with the complexity of our real world experiences. This work inspired a peer reviewed publication that outlines the promise and perils of using this method in memory research, providing researchers with a primer on how to apply this method effectively, lowering the barriers of entry for those interested in leveraging this technique.