The DataIQ New Talent Award was awarded to Sandra Matz, Junior Psychometrician and First Year PhD student in the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre. Sandra's colleague, Vess Popov, the Centre's Development Strategist, was also a short-listed nominee for the Marketing Technologist category.
The award marks a significant step in the evolution of psychometrics as a critical discipline in the analysis and prediction of behaviour from online behavioural footprints. Drawing on the law of interpersonal attraction, which suggests that our thoughts, feelings and behaviour towards other people are more positive when they are perceived as similar to themselves, Sandra uses the 'Big Five' personality dimensions to increase fit between product and consumer characteristics.
Working with several large corporations, and using models derived from the myPersonality database of over 6,000,000 individual profiles, Sandra has demonstrated that, by targeting Facebook users of a particular personality profile as well as adapting the ad text and pictures, the performance of advertisements can be increased significantly. The judges described her work as simply "the future" and "brilliant in a cutting-edge area".
Before joining the Psychometrics Centre, Sandra graduated with 1st class honours in Psychology from Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany in October 2013 and received a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation.