Sophie Mayen

Sophie Mayen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Università della Svizzera italiana, Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, affiliated with the Institute of Public Health (IPH). 

She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from the University of Vienna (September 2021 to February 2025). Her doctoral research, titled Growing Up Digital, examined adolescents' digital media use, well-being, and academic performance using experience sampling and longitudinal modeling. 

 Since March 2025, Sophie has been a postdoctoral researcher at the IPH, where she works on the SNSF-funded AWARE and GIOCO projects. Her research links communication science and media psychology with public health, epidemiology, and behavioral medicine. Methodologically, she focuses on micro-longitudinal and longitudinal designs, quantitative modeling, and computational workflows in R. 

Sophie coordinates the AWARE project and performs longitudinal analyses on how adolescents' exposure to mental illness-related content on social media relates to mental well-being and symptoms of anxiety and depression. In GIOCO, she studies how children and adolescents experience play across analogue, digital, and hybrid contexts, with a focus on how perceptions of play relate to psychological needs and developmental outcomes over time. 

https://www.aware-project.com/en