Ashley graduated in June of 2012 with an Honours Bachelor of Arts and Science with concentrations in Philosophy and Physics. She was a member of the Golden Key International Honour Society and an Outstanding Scholar for her four years at the University of Windsor and held Academic Appointments with professors in both the Philosophy department and the Physics department. After finishing her Arts and Science degree, Ashley attended the University of Waterloo where she completed her Masters in Philosophy. Her Master’s thesis was interdisciplinary in nature and focused on the cognitive ability of birds to represent the mental states of conspecifics.
Currently, Ashley is still at the University of Waterloo and is working to complete her PhD in Philosophy along with her Graduate Diploma in Cognitive Science. Her research focus for her PhD is on comparative cognition, comparing the cognitive abilities of humans and non-human animals. More specifically, Ashley is examining the abilities of different animals to represent the mental states of their conspecifics. By understanding how this cognitive ability works in animals, Ashley hopes to better understand this ability, and sometimes inability, in humans. Ashley’s doctoral research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a Canadian Graduate Scholarship. After finishing her PhD, Ashley plans to continue to broaden her interdisciplinary background by pursuing her MBA.