Judith Waalen received her B.A. in Biology and Psychology from Assumption University in 1962, her M.A. in Psychology from University of Windsor in 1964, and her Ph.D. in Sociology from Wayne State University in 1982. While at Ryerson University Dr. Waalen was a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Director of the Centre of Quality Research. She would later become a professor at Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College, working in the Graduate Studies and Research, and Post-graduate and Continuing Education departments. For many years, Judy taught Psychology courses at Ryerson to students in the professional programs and interacted with a great many faculty members in these departments in various capacities. In the mid-1980, for example, the Dean of Business Bonnie Patterson asked Judy to provide some research training to interested faculty since she felt developing the intellectual capital of her faculty was a good investment. Thus, Judy became the first Research Associate at Ryerson and over the ensuing years, a number of Ryerson faculty members advanced their education and their professional positions partly due to this research training and mentoring.

In 2000, Judy took advantage of an early retirement incentive program to leave the Psychology Department and went to manage Ryerson’s Centre for Quality Service Research and to join CMCC to teach research methods and statistics in their graduate residency programs. During this time with her husband David, she published articles on chiropractic education, and with other colleagues, she co-authored a number of articles for scientific and scholarly journals. In 2005, Judy returned to Ryerson to work as a research analyst for The Chang School. She taught staff members to conduct, analyze, and publish their research in-house, did competitive research, and conducted annual student satisfaction surveys until she left in 2011.