Psychology Welcomes Two New Faculty: Ari Kahn and Tierra Stimson
Tierra Stimson
Associate Professor of Practice
Individual's personal collection
It has been my privilege to teach at the University of Arizona since 2015 and to join the Psychology Department in 2026 as an Associate Professor of Practice. I earned my Ph.D. in (Social/Personality) Psychology from the University of California Riverside with additional training in cognitive, developmental, and quantitative psychology. Throughout my teaching career, I have taught a wide range of psychology, statistics, and research methods courses across community colleges and universities in in-person, hybrid, and fully online formats. I have also worked in both the public and private sectors, including roles in child welfare, education research and evaluation, and consulting, bringing applied, real-world perspectives into my teaching.
My work emphasizes high-quality online education guided by Quality Matters (a non-profit quality assurance organization), inclusive and accessible course design (through creation of Open Educational Resources), and student success for diverse and non-traditional learners using evidenced-based pedagogy and current career trends such as developing technical proficiency in digital literacy that is needed for lifelong career development.
My perspective as an educator is informed by a series of formative challenges: the perseverance of working through community college and university, the resilience developed and critical decision making used in a life-threatening parachute malfunction, and a dedication to integrity and compassion refined while building a service-learning course on the History and Lessons of the Holocaust, which included meeting various Holocaust survivors, supporting the Tucson (AZ) Jewish Museum & Holocaust Center and chaperoning students to the El Paso (TX) Holocaust Museum & Study Center.
Ari Kahn
Assistant Professor, Psychology and Cognitive Science
Kate Gardiner, UAHS BioCommunications Photo Department Manager
I am thrilled to be joining the Psychology Department and the Cognitive Science Program at the University of Arizona. My research focuses on computational models of planning and decision making, both in behavior and in the brain. I’m particularly interested in how humans and other animals adaptively approach complex, multi-step planning, and how we balance the inherent tradeoffs between simplified versus complex cognitive models of the world. My work is heavily inspired by reinforcement learning, which provides a computational framework to connect behavior with its neural underpinnings, either through human fMRI or frequently in collaboration with animal researchers. I also draw on network science to categorize the types of mental representations that people form in domains ranging from language to navigation. This balance between efficiency and accuracy in planning is fundamental to healthy behavior, and understanding how we do so is a also key question in development, aging, and psychiatry – directions which I hope will benefit from the strengths of the fantastic colleagues at the University of Arizona, which I am honored to be part of.