Rakoen Maertens is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Psychology, Bye-Fellow at Downing College, and Lab Manager at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab.
He acquired his PhD at the University of Cambridge on "The Long-Term Effectiveness of Inoculation Against Misinformation", funded by the ESRC and the Cambridge Trust, after graduating with a Master of Science (summa cum laude with honours) in Experimental Psychology from Ghent University, where he received the Best Master Dissertation of Belgium award by the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences and Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium for his work applying behavioural insights to tackle climate change misinformation.
At Cambridge he co-founded the Cambridge University Behavioural Insights Team and is focusing on making applied science more robust by applying the latest advancements in psychometrics, long-term impact evaluation, and behavioural insights. His research on the evaluation of the long-term impact of psychological science based interventions led to high-impact publications such as Long-term effectiveness of inoculation against misinformation: Three longitudinal experiments, with an Altmetric score of over 900, making it one of the highest impact articles in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
He has also been actively involved working on United Nations projects related to the Sustainable Development Goals with experience as Head Delegate to the United Nations, co-founder and advisor to the United Nations Association Youth Platform of the United Kingdom, and co-author of the book Gvidilo al la 17 Celoj por Daŭripova Evoluigo de Unuiĝintaj Nacioj.
