Marta Zakrzewska’s award symposium

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On 21 November 2025, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, we held a symposium celebrating our former PhD student Mart Zakrzewska.

The event, titled “The Psychology of Disease,” explored how illness shapes thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and social interactions.

The programme featured talks on:

  • Why some individuals react strongly to everyday sensory stimulation (Linus Andersson)

  • The different faces of feeling sick (Julie Lasselin)

  • Sex differences in pathogen disgust from an evolutionary perspective (Marco Tullio Liuzza)

  • How olfaction relates to social attitudes and prejudice (Marta Zakrzewska)

The symposium concluded with the award ceremony of the 2024 Young Researcher in Psychology Prize.

Marta’s award symposium

 

Marta Zakrzewska wins national Junior Researcher award

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The National committee for Psychology awards the best dissertation from all newly defended psychology dissertations in Sweden. This year, Marta Zakrzewska won with the dissertation ”Olfaction and prejudice: The role of body odor disgust sensitivity and disease avoidance in understanding social attitudes”. She did her PhD at the SCI-Lab with Jonas Olofsson as her main supervisor.

Her dissertation previously won the Department of Psychology’s (Stockholm university) best dissertation award. Today she works at RISE, after finishing a post doc at the Karolinska Institute.

The Committee motivation:

”Dr. Marta Zakrzewska tilldelas Nationalkommitténs pris till yngre forskare 2024 för sin imponerande och nyskapande forskning kring lukt och sociala fördomar. Med stor vetenskaplig noggrannhet och kreativ metodologisk bredd har Dr. Zakrzewska undersökt hur kroppsluktsaversion och sociala attityder samspelar inom ramen för det beteendemässiga immunsystemet. Genom att kombinera socialpsykologiska perspektiv med olfaktorisk forskning på ett unikt sätt har Dr. Zakrzewska belyst ett högaktuellt och originellt ämnesområde som både väcker nyfikenhet och har potential att intressera en bred publik.”

 

Marta Zakrzewska nails it! (her winning dissertation)