Birte Thissen is a visiting scholar at New York University’s Motivation Lab in the German Research Association’s Walter Benjamin Program. Her research focuses on flow states during optimal engagement with goal-oriented activities. After having studied psychology at the University of Münster and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany and as an exchange student at the University of Salamanca in Spain, she wrote her PhD thesis on the topic of flow during fiction reading at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 2020, she obtained her PhD from the Goethe University Frankfurt and received the Student Paper Award of the International Society of Empirical Study of Literature (IGEL) at its 2021 conference. She continued to work in flow research as a guest researcher at MPIEA and as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hamburg in Germany, testing the effects of self-regulation interventions on the likelihood of entering a flow state in various activities such as marathon running or chess playing. During her 2-year visiting scholarship at NYU she will further expand on this line of research with the aim of developing an effective flow intervention.