Campus in Kulmbach: Laura M. König is Junior Professor of Public Health Nutrition

Since August 2020, Prof. Dr. Laura M. König has been Junior Professor of Public Health Nutrition at the University of Bayreuth. As part of the new Faculty VII for Life Sciences: Food, Nutrition & Health, she is based at the newly founded campus in Kulmbach.

After studying psychology with a minor in computer science, Laura M. König received her doctorate in psychology at the University of Konstanz in 2018. Already during her doctorate, she conducted research and teaching in interdisciplinary teams with scientists from the nutritional sciences, computer science, and architecture. She continued these and other interdisciplinary collaborations, e.g. with media scientists, during her subsequent postdoctoral period at the University of Konstanz. Finally, from March to July 2020, she did research as a postdoctoral fellow of the DFG (German Research Foundation) at the University of Cambridge in Great Britain.

With her research, Laura König aims to contribute to a better understanding of everyday eating behaviour and, based on this, to develop preventative programmes for a healthier diet. To this end, she makes use of a wide range of theories and models from psychology, decision research, and human-computer interaction, as well as a great variety of methods. She intends to establish research methods such as the smartphone-based recording of everyday behaviour, and the use of buffets of realistically simulated food in experimental studies in a behavioural science laboratory on the Kulmbach campus.