Profile
Health Psychology Researcher. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Aberdeen and graduated with a Master’s of Science in Public Health and Health Services Research degree from Newcastle University, in Great Britain, where she also completed her doctoral studies.
Her overall research interest is maintenance of behavior change in public health. She focuses on exploring motives for behavior maintenance, habits, self-regulation, and coping with behavioral barriers. She is interested in determining how environment and social networks influence human behavior and how availability of physical and psychological resources shapes how people change and maintain health behaviors. Currently, she is leading a research project on weight loss maintenance funded by the Foundation for Polish Science through the HOMING grant: https://www.wybieramyzdrowie.pl/.
She is an active member of the European Health Psychology Society (EHPS) and Chair of the Synergy sub-committee of the EHPS. She is also Head Editor of the Practical Health Psychology blog, an online publication, addressed to healthcare practitioners, on the latest health psychology research and how to apply it in practice, published in 25 languages: www.practicalhealthpsychology.com.
She is leading the Open Digital Health initiative www.opendigitalhealth.org that aims to encourage health scientists, practitioners, and technology developers to share evidence-based digital health tools to allow digital health to grow faster, be cheaper and more transparent across different countries.
Moreover, Dominika is a frequent presenter at international, peer reviewed conferences and is invited to numerous international talks.
She is a recipient of the Herman Schaalma Award (2016) that recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of health psychology. In 2019, she received The Stan Maes Early Career Researcher Award, granted by the European Health Psychology Society. The award recognizes early career researchers for their contributions to health psychology research and to the EHPS.
She is Editor of the International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, Frontiers in Psychology (the Clinical and Health Psychology section), and of the Health Psychology Bulletin (a full disclosure journal).
Dominka is also Adjunct Research Fellow for School of Public Health, Faculty of Health Sciences at Curtin University, in Australia.