Growing up in East Germany, next to the so-called “death strip” with a heavily guarded double fence and minefields, Katrin has always wondered who she would have been had she been born 2km to the West, sparking her curiosity about the impact of cultures and institutions on behavior.

Katrin is a behavioral economist and psychologist who studies how incentives and controls affect individual motivation and the influence of culture and institutions on behavior. Her recent interest is in how these mechanisms can be applied to public health and climate policies, and the sustainability of liberal democracies. At SFI, she is drawing on the complexity sciences to better understand how the interaction between institutions and people’s preferences can be taken into account when designing public policies.

She holds a postgraduate degree in psychology. Her PhD dissertation in economics at the Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena received the Heinz Sauermann Prize of the GfeW (German Association for Experimental Economic Research), she received the State Prize for Courageous Science for her research and public engagement concerning covid policies, and the Science Prize of the Messmer Foundation for her current behavioral research on climate policies.

Three of her papers on how anti-COVID-19 policies change citizens’ preferences and beliefs appeared in PNAS. She has also published in The Economic Journal, Experimental Economics, The Journal of Neuroscience, and Human Brain Mapping. Her commentaries on public policy have appeared in the Washington Post, Nature News Feature, Science Insider, The Guardian, Times of India, Newsweek Japan, Radio France, VoxEU, LSE COVID-19 blog, and many other media outlets around the world.