Rui Mata is Professor for Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Basel, Switzerland. He is also currently a member of the Committee for Risk Research and Risk Perception of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment.

Born in 1979 in Lisbon, Portugal, Rui received his Licenciatura in Psychology from the University of Lisbon in 2002. He then moved to Germany to join the Max Planck Research School LIFE as a predoctoral fellow, working at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. He earned his doctoral degree from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2006. From 2006 to 2012, Rui held postdoctoral positions in Portugal (University of Lisbon), the United States (University of Michigan and Stanford University), and Switzerland (University of Basel). In 2012, he became a senior scientist at the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He returned to Switzerland in 2014 to take up his current position at the University of Basel.

Rui is married and the father of two daughters. While he doesn’t particularly enjoy writing about himself in the third person, he’s come to appreciate the meta-level perspective—and the psychological safety—that such a narrative affords.

An automatically updated list of his publications is available on Google Scholar.