Jolien Trekels joins us from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (NC, US) and takes over the Tenure Track Professorship for Media Literacy. Prior to going to the United States, Jolien was a Postdoctoral Fellow within the Media Psychology Lab of the Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven, Belgium, from 2019-2022.

Jolien Trekels completed both her Bachelor and Master studies in Communication Sciences at KU Leuven. In 2014, she commenced her PhD at KU Leuven's Media Psychology Lab, working on her dissertation The ubiquity of beauty-is-good in media: Understanding the importance of appearance in adolescents' lives, which she successfully defended in 2018. During her doctoral studies, she spent the 2016/17 academic year at the Department of Psychology of the University of Michigan (MI, USA) for research purposes. After completing her PhD, she secured both a PDM Postdoctoral Grant (funded by KU Leuven) and a FWO Junior Postdoctoral Grant, allowing her to pursue an extended postdoctoral career at KU Leuven. In 2022, she transitioned to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Her research focuses on digital media use and effects, well-being and mental health, and media literacy. In our Department, Jolien will explore the positive and negative impacts of digital media use, examining the conditions that shape each. Her work aims to deepen our understanding of how to foster (digital) media literacy in society. She employs a range of communication and social psychology methods – both quantitative and qualitative – including experiments, surveys, mobile experience sampling, neuro-imaging methods, and social network analysis. In addition to publishing extensively in internationally renowned journals such as the Journal of Communication, Psychology of Popular Media, Communication Research, Mass Communication and Society, and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Jolien has also been successful in acquiring third-party grant funding. Beyond numerous individual postdoctoral grants (2018/2019), she contributed as a collaboration partner to a two million dollar project in North Carolina (A neurobiological susceptibility approach on social media’s influence on character development among adolescents). Shortly before her appointment at the University of Vienna, she secured funding for a personal postdoctoral fellowship (researching social media use and adolescence) from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) worth approximately € 300.000 – which she ultimately did not take up due to starting the permanent position at our Department.

A very warm welcome to Vienna, dear Jolien!