Dr. Kowalski has been a professor at UNBC since 2024. His research background is in the field of personality psychology, with particular emphasis on two distinct areas: dark personality traits and rumination.

Previously, Dr. Kowalski completed his PhD at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) where he developed a content-dependent measure of rumination (the Rumination Domains Questionnaire). Moreover, during his time at UWO he has done extensive work investigating dark personality traits, including work on the measurement of sub-clinical sadism, as well as examining the putative redundancy between Machiavellianism and psychopathy, as currently measured.