What have you been doing before?
I was trained in Jena, Germany, as a social psychologist with a focus on intergroup relations. During my PhD, I got fascinated by embodiment research. As a postdoc, I thus started to study the role of the body in social cognition, with an emphasis on social relations.
For instance, I look at why power is thought about as height, why communality is thought about as bodily merging, and how this ties into nonverbal communication. With these questions, I went to Würzburg, Amsterdam, and then Lisboa to work as as a postdoc and then researcher.
What are you planning to do?
I have two areas I am working on right now: First, I plan to write down a more general model of the bodily grounding of social relations, their cognition, and their communication. Second, because I see a deficit in methods used to study embodiment, I work on experimental open source hard- and software that will allow new fun experiments.
There are a number of other ideas that I might pursue if collaborations with students and colleagues arise, for instance on the social psychology of food and eating.
