Marc Mehu, PhD is a psychologist. Mehu studied psychology at the University of Liège in Belgium, with specializations in cognitive-behavioral therapy and ethology. After two ethological field studies on non-human primate behavior in South India and the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, he completed a PhD in evolutionary psychology and behavioral ecology at the University of Liverpool in England in 2007. In his doctoral thesis, Mehu investigated the function of smiling and laughter in social interactions.

He was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychology at Webster Vienna in October 2013 and was promoted to Associate Professor of Psychology in January 2019. Prior to this, in the final years of his PhD, he spent several months as a visiting researcher at the (former) Ludwig-Boltzmann-Institute for Urban Ethology, hosted by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna. He then moved to the University of Geneva for a postdoctoral position at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. His main interests lie in the study of affective phenomena and social behavior from an evolutionary perspective. In particular, he is interested in the role of emotion and nonverbal behavior in competitive and cooperative social interactions. In 2004, he became a certified coder of the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) and has used it extensively in his research.

Dr. Mehu, as a member of the Social Signal Processing Network (SSPNet), also has a great interest in the automatic analysis of communicative behavior and in affective computing. More recently, he has moved towards applying his research to the fields of negotiation, political communication and clinical psychology.