My name is Christopher Madan. I am a faculty member at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. My research examines how people remember, think, decide, and make sense of their experiences, with a particular focus on why some experiences become especially memorable and consequential.
Bio
A central theme in my work is that memory is not a neutral record of the past. People remember through the lens of what matters to them: what was emotional, rewarding, meaningful, familiar, surprising, or useful for later decisions. I study these influences because they help explain not only what people retain, but how remembered experiences shape later thought, behaviour, and identity.
This interest in meaningful experience connects several areas of my research. In laboratory studies, I examine how emotion, reward, and prior knowledge influence memory and decision-making. In autobiographical memory research, I study how people remember personally significant events and how those memories remain stable or change over time. In work on emerging technologies, I am interested in how tools for search, recording, recommendation, and artificial intelligence are beginning to alter what people remember for themselves and what they outsource to external systems.
Another major part of my work examines variation in brain structure itself. I have used structural neuroimaging to study brain morphology across development, aging, clinical populations, and species. This work is less about localising specific psychological functions and more about developing and applying quantitative measures of brain shape, complexity, and structural organisation.
Across these projects, my approach is problem-driven. I use the methods that best fit the question, whether that means behavioural experiments, neuroimaging, computational modelling, open datasets, evidence synthesis, or qualitative research. This orientation has also led me to write about research methods, reproducibility, analytic robustness, and measurement, especially where better methods can make psychological science more transparent and cumulative.
Honours include the APS Rising Star (2017), Psychonomic Society Fellow (2017) and Early Career Award (2021), the BACN Early Career Award (2025), AdvanceHE Senior Fellow (2025), and the University of Nottingham Lord Dearing Award for Teaching & Learning (2025).
Beyond research, I’m committed to fostering career development. I edited Academia and the World Beyond (Springer, 2022 & 2024)—over 50 interviews mapping post-PhD pathways inside and outside academia, along with associated qualitative analyses of these interviews. I also wrote An Introduction to MATLAB for Behavioural Researchers (Sage, 2014), a hands-on guide to analysis and reproducible workflows for behavioural scientists. I also author tutorial/methods pieces (e.g., learning-strategy series; semi-automated data analysis procedures) to make rigorous methods more accessible.
Most recently, my book Memories That Matter: How We Remember Important Things (Routledge, 2024) translates motivated-memory and memory-strategy research for a broader audience—linking evidence to everyday learning and wellbeing.
