Maria-Therese Friehs is postdoctoral researcher at the work unit for psychological methods and evaluation at the FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. She is a passionate intergroup contact researcher, focussing mostly on how intergroup contact evolves and affects attitudes over time, how contact is experienced in everyday life, and how contact experiences are linked to basic psychological needs. Therese is also interested in social perception research, mainly concerning the assessment of stereotypes and prejudice. She enjoys applying advanced quantitative analytical models and doing longitudinal data analysis and scale construction. She also did a lot of large-scale secondary data analysis and re-analyses of published data.

Together with Mathias Kauff and Oliver Christ, Therese is one of the organizers of the EASP small group meeting on intergroup contact in Hamburg in August 2024.