On September 1, 2021, Sonja Vogt joined the Department of Strategy, Globalization and Society at the Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Lausanne, as Associate Professor in Grand Challenges.
Sonja Vogt’s research emphasizes the use of behavioral science to promote sustainable economic and social development. To do so, Vogt’s research uses a mix of lab, online, and field experiments to examine decision making in domains related to public health and gender, education, sustainable land management, and climate change. For example, with respect to gender, she has worked on strategies to reduce female genital cutting in Sudan and sex-selective abortion of females in Armenia. She is currently investigating the use of narratives to improve educational outcomes in South Africa and Malawi. She is also the principal investigator of a large project on digital solutions for sustainable land management among farmers with small land holdings (Agripath) in Burkino Faso, Nepal, Uganda, Tanzania, and India.
Prof. Vogt obtained her doctorate from Utrecht University and was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Zurich and the University of Oxford. She has published in journals such as Demography, Biological Conservation, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Nature Human Behaviour, Science, and Nature.
She is affiliated with Nuffield College, the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, and the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Bern. She is also principal investigator of the Policy and Cultural Evolution Lab (https://pacelab.org/).