I am completing my PhD in economics and social sciences (Dr. rer. pol.) at the Technical University of Munich, focusing on consumer psychology. My dissertation, Explaining the Adoption of Sustainable Consumption Practices, examines what drives people to consume more sustainably and to consume less.
01
Sustainable Food Consumption
What drives people to adopt diets that are good for both the planet and their health? Extending the Comprehensive Action Determination Model, I compare the roles of environmental concern, social and personal norms, perceived consumer effectiveness, self-efficacy and health consciousness among German consumers.
As a visiting researcher with the Low Harm Hedonism Initiative at the University of Queensland, I also studied how omnivores perceive blended meat products (part meat, part plants) through in-depth interviews. Follow-up work tests menu-label disclosure experimentally and in a tasting study with UQ's FoodLab. This builds on my master's research on plant-based, insect-based and cultured meat.
Survey research · Structural equation modelling · Qualitative interviews · Online & tasting experiments
02
Social Psychology
When people compare themselves to someone who consumes less, are they more willing to refrain from purchases? I test this experimentally, examining green consumption values and temperance character strengths as moderators, including in the context of Christmas gift-giving in the UK.
Experiments · Moderation & mediation · Social comparison theory
03
Food & Wellbeing
Resilient by Recipe (with Karina Konieczny) explores whether a dietary lunch intervention can support entrepreneurs' mental health, combining founder interviews with wearable-based physiological measurement. The intervention study is planned for 2027.
My background in health sciences and my own passion for sport shape my interest in how everyday food and activity choices affect wellbeing.
Field intervention · Wearables · Validated psychological scales
Next
Where I Am Heading: Real Behaviour, AI and Psychology
In my postdoc, I want to build on this work in two directions. First, I want to study what people actually do rather than what they report: purchase and consumption data, field and behavioural experiments with real choices, and data from wearables. Second, I want to explore how AI and large language models can support psychological research, for example in designing and pretesting interventions, analysing open text and interview data, or modelling consumer responses, and how AI-based tools can themselves encourage more sustainable choices.
Behavioural data · Field experiments · AI & large language models · Consumer psychology