Heisenberg Professorship for Heidelberg Psychologist
2 August 2018
Psychologist Dr Jan Rummel has been awarded a Heisenberg Professorship at Heidelberg University. The five-year position funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) is an outstanding distinction for highly qualified young researchers. The professorship at the Institute of Psychology establishes the research field of cognitive self-regulation. Dr Rummel’s research focuses on human attention and memory processes and the related abilities of self-regulated remembering and forgetting.
Among his research topics, Jan Rummel studies what is commonly known as prospective memory. “This is the ability to independently remember to perform an intended action at the right time, such as keep an appointment. In everyday life, the memory for intentions plays an important role because it underlies every type of systematic and future-oriented behavior,” explains Dr Rummel. The cognition researcher also studies mind-wandering phenomena. To this end, he combines cognitive methods such as measurement of reaction times or eye movements with the analysis of thought reports.
Jan Rummel (b. 1980) earned his degree in psychology at Heidelberg University and completed his dissertation in 2011 at Marburg University. Subsequent research took him to the University of Mannheim and the Furman University in Greenville (USA). He has been the principal investigator of the “Cognition and Attention Regulation” Junior Research Group at Ruperto Carola since 2013.
The Heisenberg Professorship is one of the most prestigious funding instruments for postdoctoral researchers in Germany. The five-year professorship comes with a tenure-track option – contingent on a positive evaluation by the DFG and the University.
