Maria Poes­sel stud­ied Psy­chol­o­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Leipzig, which she fin­ished in 2013 with her the­sis about the socio-sex­u­al devel­op­ment of sex­u­al child Moles­ters and Pedophiles in ear­ly childhood.
She joined the O’Brain-Project in spring 2013. Her cur­rent research focus lies on olfac­tion in obe­si­ty and the influ­ence of odor stim­u­la­tion on deci­sion mak­ing. For the data col­lec­tion she uti­lize behav­iour­al and lat­er func­tion­al mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing or func­tion­al MRI (fMRI) par­a­digms. For the olfac­to­ry data acqui­si­tion, specif­i­cal­ly, she apply Snif­fin stics and an olfactometer.