 | Jana Berkessel, Dr.Affiliated, Postdoctoral Researcher
Jana Berkessel is an associated postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Behavioral Science and Technology and also serves as Open Science Advisor at the Open Science Office at the University of St. Gallen. In her research, she combines social, personality, and cultural psychological theories with a broad range of data sources to study how the cultural contexts in which we live—whether it be countries, regions, or historical periods—shape what makes us happy and healthy. For example, her work has shown that the well-being consequences of poverty differ between religious and non-religious cultures, that the detrimental effects of obesity on health and well-being are reduced in cultural contexts where obesity is more prevalent, and that Republicans live longer in U.S. states with more Republican cultures. Jana received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Psychology from the University of Cologne, including a semester abroad at the University of Mississippi, as well as research stays at Princeton University and the University of Cambridge. She then moved to the University of Mannheim to pursue her Ph.D. in cross-cultural social and personality psychology, funded by a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes). During her Ph.D., she also received a Fulbright Scholarship to conduct research at Columbia University. Her work has been published in leading journals in the field, including Psychological Science and PNAS, and has received several awards, including the SPSP Heritage Dissertation Award and the Heinz-Heckhausen Prize of the German Psychological Society. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research at the University of Mannheim. |
