Team & collaborators

Sylvia Kairouz, PhD

Scientific co-director of the HERMES team
Full professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University

Sylvia Kairouz has published extensively in sociology, social epidemiology and public health journals and won the Brain Star Award from the Canadian Institute of Health Research for her innovative work on the role of social contexts in alcohol consumption. She is currently engaged in funded research examining comprehensive multilevel models of determinants of gambling behaviours. She has piloted six large population surveys in Quebec and collaborates with scholars and key institutions in Quebec, Canada and internationally.

Research interests: gambling; addictive behaviours; social inequalities; gambling technologies in the cyberspace.

Magali Dufour, PhD

Full professor, Department of Psychology, Université du Québec à Montréal

Magali Dufour works in collaboration with the Research Chair on Gambling and is also involved as a researcher with the HERMES team, the Institut Universitaire sur les Dépendances and the Centre de recherche Charles-Lemoyne. Her research focuses on addiction, particularly problematic Internet use (especially among adolescents). She is also interested in the evaluation, treatment and consequences of gambling addiction.

Research interests: Internet use in adolescence; gambling; poker use in adolescence; effects of childhood trauma; adolescent cyberaddiction; comorbidity between gambling and addiction.

Adèle Morvannou, PhD

Associate professor, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Université de Sherbrooke

Adèle Morvannou has been collaborating with the Research Chair on Gambling and HERMES since 2013, contributing to research, publications, and knowledge mobilization initiatives on gambling-related issues. Her research examines gambling-related harms, help-seeking processes, stigma, and service accessibility, with a particular focus on women's experiences. In parallel, she develops and evaluates innovative educational approaches aimed at strengthening relational and clinical competencies among addiction professionals.

Research interests: gambling; poker players; gender studies - gambling among women; behavioural addictions; concept of passion; mixed methods.

Abu Saleh Mohammad Sowad, PhD

Abu Saleh Mohammad Sowad is an Aspiration Postdoctoral Fellow with the ERC-funded MENBELONG Project at the School of Nursing, University of Victoria. His research examines how transnational migration reshapes masculinity, belonging, and well-being among migrant men in diasporic contexts, drawing on intersectional and critical qualitative approaches. He holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Analysis from Concordia University and an MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation from the London School of Economics. He previously served as an assistant professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and has held research and consulting roles with organizations including ActionAid Bangladesh, NETZ, Oxfam, and USAID/Bangladesh.

Research interests: migration; masculinities; migrant men; belonging and well-being; intersectionality; qualitative research.

Lesley Lambo, PhD

Lesley Lambo has a PhD from Concordia University in Social and Cultural Analysis. She has worked at the Research Chair on Gambling since 2013 as administrator and coordinator. More recently, Lesley is working on qualitative research and publications related to socio-cultural notions of gender and gambling. 

Research interests: gender; gambling; intimate partner violence.

Ingo Fiedler, PhD

Ingo Fiedler is co-founder of the non-profit Blockchain Research Lab in Hamburg, and Affiliate Assistant Professor at Concordia University, Montreal. He holds diplomas both in business administration and economics and obtained his award-winning PhD from the University of Hamburg. Fiedler authored 9 books and over 50 articles in academic journals. He regularly adds to the public knowledge on his main research topics – gambling and Blockchain – by commenting in various media outlets and by consulting key policy stakeholders.

Research interests: gambling; Blockchain; cryptocurrencies; public health; law and economics.

Annie-Claude Savard, PhD

Full professor, École de travail social et de criminologie

Annie-Claude Savard holds a research grant on responsible gambling entitled: Jeu responsable et transition à la vie adulte : de l’expérience subjective à la prévention (FRQ-SC : 2017-2021). Using a sociological perspective, her research studies the underlining rationales of gambling habits adoption among youth and young adults in regard to the social context in which they develop, on the social representations of responsible gambling concepts held by young adults and by the actors within formal institutions, and on the development of individually and socially responsible gambling initiatives. She is also a researcher at the Institut universitaire sur les dépendances, a collaborator for the RISQ group (Recherche et intervention sur les substances psychoactives – Québec), and for the Centre jeunesse de Québec – Institut universitaire.

Research interests: sociology of gambling; youth and young adults; individually and socially responsible gaming; stigmatization of individuals with addictions; social justice.

Jean-Michel Costes

Jean-Michel Costes is a social epidemiologist. He worked for the Direction de la recherche of the Ministry of Health in France, then served as director of the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (1995-2011) and general secretary of the gambling observatory (2011-2020). He conducted several quantitative and qualitative surveys on the social and addictive dimensions of licit and illicit drug use and gambling practices as well as evaluations of public policies in the field of addictions. Since 2020, he is a member of the National Gambling Authority, an independent authority aiming at regulating gambling in France.

Research interests: gambling; addictive behaviours; associated social factors; hybridization between gaming and gambling; regulation and risk reduction strategies.

Eva Monson, PhD

Associate professor, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, Université de Sherbrooke

Eva Monson has worked in collaboration with the Research Chair on Gambling since 2013 on multiple publications ranging in topic from the effects of Quebec tobacco legislation to the associations found between adverse life events and gambling behaviour. She is also an active member of the HERMES team. Her current research is devoted to investigating how social and environmental deprivation, from the level of the individual to the neighbourhoods where they reside, factor into the dialogue concerning responsible gambling practices.

Research interests: mental health; traumatic stress; gambling; epidemiology and contextual factors.

Spencer Murch, PhD

Spencer Murch is an AGRI Postdoctoral Fellow working under Daniel McGrath and Andrew Kim in the Department of Psychology at the University of Calgary. He obtained his PhD in Cognitive Psychology from UBC Vancouver (2020) and completed a CIHR Postdoctoral Fellowship under Sylvia Kairouz and Martin French in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University (Montreal). Spencer’s research seeks to leverage emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies towards the prevention of harms related to online gambling. This includes mining ‘big’ datasets for behavioural markers of problem gambling, developing AI-based gambling harm detection systems, and using generative AI systems to create always new Responsible Gambling messages and imagery.

Research interests: gambling disorder; habit-forming digital products; machine learning.

Martin French, PhD

Associate professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University

Martin French’s research examines the social dimensions of technology with an empirical focus on communications and information technology (CIT). It emphasizes the broader social and political contexts of CIT, focusing especially on risk, surveillance, privacy, and social justice. He recently embarked on a study of efforts to regulate ‘dangerous’, ‘risky’, and ‘contentious’ forms of digitally-mediated consumption. A key set of questions underlying this study concerns what might be termed the ‘gamblification’ of games, the incorporation of addictive, gambling-like retention mechanics into digital games. 

Research interests: risk; surveillance; social justice.

Ivano Argondizzo

Ivano Argondizzo holds a master's degree in Sociology and is a research associate at Concordia University’s Research Chair on Gambling. He also collaborates with Dr. Florent Michelot on research at the intersection of AI, disinformation and education. His master's thesis was a 70-year cohort and time-series analysis of youth suicide rate trends in Canada (1950–2019). His current work focuses on quantitative analysis and survey research in gambling studies, and on AI, disinformation, and social media.

Research interests: data analysis; quantitative methods; social risk and harms; suicide.

Jean-Philippe Laforge

Jean-Philippe Laforge holds a MA in Sociology and is a research professional at Concordia University’s Research Chair on Gambling and Université Laval’s School of Social Work and Criminology. His master’s thesis focused on the integration of free-to-play gaming practices in the everyday lives of players. His research interests focus on time, technology as well as gambling and gaming practices in everyday life.

Research interests: gambling and gaming practices in everyday life; time; mobile technologies; indigenous studies; advertisements for gambling and free-to-play games; qualitative methods.

Halle Kott

Halle Kott holds a master's degree from Concordia University in Social and Cultural Anthropology, where she completed a thesis that explored how affective atmospheres affect menstrual health among athletes. She is largely interested in questions surrounding risk, harm, and bodily and emotional experience. She has been part of the Research Chair on Gambling team since 2024.

Research interests: risk and harm; emotions; bodily experience; social inequality; qualitative methods.

Eva Doroshev

Eva Doroshev holds a BA in Communication from Concordia University and has been working with the Research Chair on Gambling since 2024. She supports the Chair’s communications through website management, digital content, social media, newsletters, event promotion and visual design.

Research interests: science communication; digital media and culture; health communication; public engagement with research; media representations of social issues.

Léo Chester-Trudel

Léo Chester-Trudel is a BA Honours student in Psychology at Concordia University and a research assistant at the Research Chair on Gambling. He completed his honours thesis on healthy and harmful free-to-play gaming among older adults, examining the roles of gaming practices, spending patterns, and playing motives in game-related harms. His broader research interests concern the psychosocial and developmental factors associated with healthy and harmful engagement with digital technologies, including video gaming, internet and screen use, and gambling. He is particularly interested in understanding why these behaviours become harmful for some individuals, and how these processes vary across developmental and life-course contexts. 

Research interests: problematic video gaming; problematic internet and digital media use; screen use; gambling; behavioural addictions; developmental psychopathology.

Zoe Odessa Slobodzian

Zoe is completing a BA in Sociology, along with a BA in Liberal Arts, at Concordia University. She is interested in interdisciplinary research that explores how trauma is understood and represented within different social and institutional contexts.

Research interests: experiential knowledge production; medicalization; memory and narrative; criminology and deviance; addiction; trauma and victimization; early modern philosophy.