Zexi Zhou
Assistant professor
Psychology
- Contact:
- zexizhou@uvic.ca
- Credentials:
- PhD (UT Austin)
- Area(s) of expertise:
- Lifespan health and development
- Related links:
Interests
- Daily stress and adaptive processes in healthy aging
- Intergenerational relationships across the lifespan
- Family caregiving for people living with dementia
- Biopsychosocial processes in health and well-being
- Ambulatory assessment and sensor technologies
- Digital health and artificial intelligence
Faculty bio
The overarching goal of my research is to understand how people maintain health and well-being, adapt to challenges, and thrive across the lifespan, especially as they navigate aging and the complexities of family dynamics. I pursue this goal through two interconnected lines of research.
First, I study daily stress and adaptive processes in healthy aging, with a particular focus on the interplay between sleep and psychosocial experiences in older adults’ everyday lives. Second, I examine intergenerational ties across the lifespan, including the neurobiological and psychosocial mechanisms underlying parent–child bonds and how these processes are embedded in sociocultural contexts to shape individual and familial well-being.
My work integrates multiple methods, including cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, neuroimaging, computational approaches, and ambulatory assessments such as ecological momentary assessment (EMA), accelerometry, and naturalistic audio recordings. By bringing together biological processes, physiological rhythms, psychological experiences, and family relationships, my work speaks to important questions about how individuals and families adapt, stay healthy, and maintain quality of life across generations in this era of rapid population aging.