Christel Lutz is associate professor and responsible for the psychology courses at University College Utrecht. As of February 2017 she is also UU Teaching Fellow. She is co-founder and board member of the Teaching Academy Utrecht University, http://tauu.uu.nl.

Professional Focus: The themes of Christel’s teaching and research are motivation, learning, and the intellectual and identity development of students as well as educators. In addition, she is happy to discuss the liberal arts and positive psychology, any time.

Functions: Christel has been teaching psychology at University College Utrecht since 2003. Since 2004 she has been responsible for the psychology education at UCU as fellow of the Social Science Department. As researcher she has been connected with the department Education at Utrecht University since 2014. Previously she was tutor (academic counselor for individual students) and senior tutor (responsible for the professional development of UCUs tutorial team). From September 2012 until September 2014 she was UU Teaching Fellow, in which capacity she developed the UCUinUtrecht program.

Education: Christel studied physics at Utrecht University and received her MSc for her theoretical thesis entitled Relativistic Thermodynamics with the group Foundations of Physics (prof. Dennis Dieks). She also did experimental work with the group Physics of Man (prof. Jan Koenderink), studying visual attention. The latter work led to her PhD studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA. In Philadelphia she was trained as an experimental cognitive psychologist. She received her PhD title in 2003 for her dissertation Perception of Time and Rhythm with professor Saul Sternberg. At the University of Pennsylvania she was also trained as university teacher. Since then, teaching has been central in her work. Christel spent her sabbatical in spring 2010 at Harvard University at the Department of Psychology and Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 2011-2012 she participated in UUs program for educational leadership (CEUT).