Dr. Kevin Laughren brings passion for pedagogy to new role as economics lecturer

The Department of Economics is pleased to welcome Dr. Kevin Laughren to the faculty as a lecturer. He spent the past three years as a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct assistant professor at Queen’s University Smith School of Business, where he designed the new course Principles of Economics for Business.

Laughren is passionate about teaching and instructional methods. He has designed experiments to test the effectiveness of educational tools or pedagogical methods, including one experiment he conducted as a PhD student which measured the effects of a first-year seminar here at SFU. “We learned that seminars attract great students,” Laughren says. “I think undergraduate seminars are a wonderful thing offered by SFU's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and I am excited to lead a few of these seminars in the coming years.”

In addition to teaching skills, Laughren brings a research interest in experimental economics. Recently Laughren published a paper in Experimental Economics with professor David Freeman called Task Completion Without Commitment, a behavioural economics experiment that studies procrastination. Experiments like this one provide a clean setting to help economists inform the models of decision-making we use to understand and predict economic choices. He is currently working on a new way to collect data for experiments, an adaptive sampling methodology called partitioned sampling algorithm (PSA), which can be applited to experimental contexts that have big data.

Laughren is no stranger to SFU's economics department, having completed his PhD in economics at SFU in 2021. He is excited to join the economics faculty, as the department faculty includes several active researchers who use economic experiments, and SFU has a great tradition of involving students in experimental research.  “But just as importantly,” Laughren adds, “All of the staff and faculty are kind people with integrity who contribute to a sense of community in the department.”

Being close to the mountains is also a draw, as Laughren enjoys snowboarding and backcountry skiing.

“I am a proud SFU alumni and I look forward to this full-time role where I can really focus on improving my teaching over the long term and sharing best practices across SFU,” Laughren says.