Marianne Schmid Mast
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Through Switzerland and Virtual reality
Biography
Marianne Schmid Mast was born in Olten (Switzerland) and did her primary school in Däniken, Solothurn. When she was 10, her family moved to Oberkulm and she went to Bezirksschule Unterkulm and then to Handelsschule (Alte KantonSchule Aarau) in Aarau. After receiving her business diploma, she completed her Matura in economics at the École Supérieure de Commerce in Neuchâtel. She worked for a computer company for a year, and later on she spent half a year traveling in Brazil. She then started medical school at the University of Zurich to discover that her passion is in Psychology. This is when she started to study psychology at the University of Zurich. She was always interested in understanding the interpersonal interactions at work which led her to become a full professor of organizational behavior at the University of Lausanne. Marianne Schmid Mast is married and has two sons. The family lives in Pully.
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Academic career
Marianne Schmid Mast received her Master in Psychology in 1996 and her Ph.D. in psychology in 2000, both from University of Zurich. She then continued her research at Northeastern University, Boston, USA, in the Social and Personality Psychology Area, working with Judith A. Hall. Back in Switzerland at the University of Zurich in Social and Health Psychology, she was appointed assistant professor in Social Psychology at the University of Fribourg. In 2006 she became a full professor of Personnel Psychology at the Department of Work and Organizational Psychology at the University of Neuchatel and she was appointed full professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of Lausanne, in August 2014. Since 2021 she is the dean of the Faculty of Business and Economics, HEC Lausanne. She currently is a member of the editorial board of the journal Leadership Quarterly and was an associate editor of the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. She is a former president of the Swiss Psychological Association and in 2018, 2019, and 2020 she was nominated as one of the 50 most influential living psychologists worldwide and has been appointed a Fellow of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, as well as a Division 8 Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) for her extraordinary, distinctive and longstanding contributions to the science of personality and social psychology.
Research
Her research addresses how individuals in power hierarchies interact with others, how they perceive their social interaction partners, and how they communicate (verbally and nonverbally). Moreover, she studies how first impressions affect interpersonal interactions and evaluations and how people form accurate impressions of others. One aspect of her research is concerned with how physician communication affects patient outcomes. She uses immersive virtual environment technology to investigate interpersonal behavior and communication as well as computer-based automatic sensing to analyze nonverbal behavior in social interactions.
Virtual reality
Marianne Schmid Mast has created her immersive virtual reality laboratory when she was at the University of Neuchâtel in 2006. In 2014, the laboratory was moved with her to the Faculty of Business and Economics, HEC, at the University of Lausanne and is subsequently known under the name of Interpersonal Behavior Laboratory. She uses immersive virtual reality for the study of human social interaction behavior and for interpersonal skills training.