Ari Decter-Frain

Faculty of Arts  
Valedictorian

Ari Decter-Frain is a philosopher at heart, with a passion for promoting equality and social justice using an interdisciplinary approach to engage in civil discourse and critical thought. Decter-Frain has excelled across eight different academic disciplines, with particular interest in philosophy, psychology, and economics. This breadth has led him to believe the social sciences are exponentially more powerful when synthesized to create policies that will allow for a more just society.

Decter-Frain has involved himself in every aspect of academic life. He has served as a teaching assistant for three different introductory level courses as well as the Psychology Department’s honours-level statistics course. He also progressed from volunteer to a grant-funded research assistant and the first-ever manager in Dr. Jeremy Frimer’s Moral Psychology Lab, where he collected research that earned him three peer-reviewed publications as first author.

Decter-Frain has earned several scholarships, awards, and grants for his high academic standing, including the Academic Proficiency Scholarship (2013, 2014, 2015); the Dr. John and Elizabeth Coté Award (2015); the Campbell K. Shepherd Memorial Scholarship (2015); the Dr. C J. Robson Scholarship, Psychology (2014); and the Dean's Honour List-Student of Highest Distinction (several years in a row).

Along with his academic work, Decter-Frain worked at the Public Interest Law Centre of Manitoba (PILC), which provided him another venue for intellectual growth. PILC is a government-initiated, independent, non-profit legal organization that takes a multidisciplinary approach to representing the public in cases deemed critical to public interest. While there, he worked on projects spanning the fields of biology, economics, law, and psychology. The experience taught him to synthesize problem-solving methods from multiple disciplines, and translate the results into clear policy recommendations, linked tightly to empirical evidence.

Decter-Frain will continue to passionately delve into the areas of equality and social justice while pursuing his Masters of Inequalities and the Social Sciences at the prestigious London School of Economics, in the United Kingdom.

This Spring Convocation is a family affair: Ari Decter-Frain’s mother, Dr. Jennifer Frain, is receiving UWinnipeg’s Distinguished Alumni Award.