Dr. Hanna Fechner

Lecturer and Research Officer in Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences and Quantitative Methods
T +41 41 229 59 27 • Alpenquai 4, Room 8 • hanna.fechner@unilu.ch

CV

Hanna Fechner studied Psychology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, and University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. She also has a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Statistical Data Science from the University of Bern and a Diplom in Communication in Social and Economic Contexts from the Berlin University of the Arts. During her studies of Psychology, she was involved as a research assistant in projects at the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

She conducted her PhD research at the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. She was a member of the Graduate School of the Max Planck International Research Network on Aging. In this research, she explored the cognitive foundations of decision-making strategies across the lifespan by combining behavioral and neuroimaging data with computational models in the cognitive architecture ACT-R.

After that, she became a postdoctoral researcher at the Cognitive Psychology Unit at the University of Zürich in the University Research Priority Program on Dynamics of Healthy Aging and at the Center for Economic Psychology, University of Basel, where she conducted empirical research projects and developed computational models for human memory and decision making, including the effects of aging and cognitive training. She has also been a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zürich, where she investigated memory and language processing in older adults by combining longitudinal behavioral data, cognitive modeling, and machine-learning techniques.

She taught courses for Bachelor and Master students of Psychology, Computational and Digital Linguistics on learning and memory, judgment and decision making, computational models of cognition, programming, data visualization, and statistics using R, and supervised empirical research projects. She professionalized her teaching skills with the Certificate of University Didactics and the Higher Education Certificate Supporting Learning from the University of Basel. Since February 2022, she is a lecturer and senior researcher at the Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine at the University of Lucerne.