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

Rui Mata was born 1979 in Lisbon, Portugal. He received a Licenciatura in Psychology from the University of Lisbon in 2002 and then moved to Germany to became a predoctoral fellow of the Max Planck Research School LIFE, working at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. He received a doctoral degree from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2006. Between 2006 and 2012, he was a postdoctoral researcher in Portugal (University of Lisbon), the United States of America (University of Michigan, Stanford University), and Switzerland (University of Basel). In 2012, he took up a position as senior scientist at the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. In 2014, Rui returned to Switzerland to take up a position as Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel.

Rui is married and has two daughters. He doesn’t particularly enjoy writing about himself in the 3rd person but has learned to appreciate the meta-level insights such an exercise provides.

Rui occasionally posts on social media channels, such as Twitter and LinkedIn.