About Us
Our core research areas include:
1. Developmental health and lifespan perspectives
Health is dynamic and evolves across the lifespan. We therefore adopt a lifespan and developmental perspective, including input from child and adolescent psychiatry and physiotherapy. We are interested in early adversity/trauma, family and social factors, inequalities, but also protective influences such as secure attachment or nature-related experiences. We want to understand when prevention is most effective in development, and how interventions and psychotherapeutic techniques need to be tailored to different ages and life stages. At the other end of human life span, we are interested in how biopsychological aspects affect quality of life and well-being in the elderly. We investigate physical and psychological causes for declines in health and psychological well-being.
2. Exercise as medicine
Physical activity benefits not only the cardiovascular system but also brain function, mood and mental health. In this line of research, we examine which type, dose, and intensity of exercise is particularly effective for improving psychological and physical health – for example in stress, subclinical depressive symptoms, or healthy ageing. We combine movement science, psychology, and biological markers (e.g. inflammation, endocrine responses) to develop evidence-based ways to use physical activity as a preventive behavior but also as an intervention for improving health.
3. Brain-based risk and resilience
We investigate why some individuals remain healthy despite significant stress, while others become more vulnerable. Using neuroscientific methods (e.g. fMRI, EEG) in combination with psychological, behavioral, and physiological data, we aim to identify early neural and psychological markers of risk and resilience (e.g. for depression, stress-related disorders, or burnout). This knowledge helps to design targeted prevention strategies for vulnerable groups and sensitive developmental periods.
4. Emotion regulation and mental health
A central focus is how people regulate their emotions – and under which conditions these strategies protect mental health or, conversely, increase vulnerability. We investigate well-established strategies such as cognitive reappraisal, distraction, and expressive suppression, and examine their neural foundations using functional MRI (fMRI) as well as behavioral and self-report measures. Experimental fMRI paradigms allow us to track how the brain responds to emotional challenges and how successful regulation is supported by networks involved in cognitive control, salience processing, and self-referential thought. In addition, we complement lab-based work with ecological and experience-sampling approaches to understand emotion regulation in everyday life. The overarching goal is to generate mechanistic knowledge that can inform prevention, early intervention, and clinical applications.
5. Workplace well-being and healthy organizations
Health is also shaped by the contexts in which we work and interact. We therefore study organizational, social, and individual factors that contribute to well-being, exhaustion, motivation, and recovery at work. Topics range from ergonomics and physical safety over digital and hybrid work, leadership, psychosocial stressors, to organization-based preventive programs. The aim is to design and evaluate evidence-based approaches to healthy, resilient, and inclusive workplaces.
6. Integrated biopsychosocial models
Across all areas, we aim to integrate biological, psychological, and social levels of analysis – for example through multimodal datasets, longitudinal designs, and advanced statistical modelling. This allows us to capture complex health trajectories (e.g. stress → sleep → immune function → mood) in a more realistic way. For doctoral candidates, this means working at genuine interdisciplinary intersections and gaining experience with multimodal, cutting-edge methods.