Nele Dael

Nele Dael is a Senior Behavioral Scientist at IMD Business School, where she co-leads the Workplace Well-being Initiative. An emotion psychologist by training, Dael’s research examines the psychological foundations for sustainable performance – spanning employee mental health, leadership, personal resilience, stress and recovery, and emotion regulation – shaping how people work and lead.

At IMD, Dael translates scientific evidence into actionable frameworks for executives and organizations navigating the demands of today’s workplace. Her work contributes to IMD’s broader mission of empowering leaders to cultivate healthy organizational cultures, reduce burnout, and sustain employee engagement over time. She has authored academic and practitioner publications, including Harvard Business Review, Frontiers Organizational Psychology, Emotion, and Journal of Personality Research.

Before joining IMD and in addition to doing research, she helped spin-off start-ups from EPFL and IDEAP to test and develop an interactive digital technology and machine learning algorithms based on human perception and behavior with the aim to support evidence-based, functional business applications.