A native of Saarland, Germany, she received her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed postdoctoral training at Duke University Medical Center and at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. Dr. Spaniol currently directs the Memory and Decision Processes Laboratory at Ryerson, whose members study the role of motivation in higher-order cognition in younger and older adults. Dr. Spaniol and her trainees use a combination of behavioural and neuroimaging methods and have received research funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada.