Tania Singer

Tania Singer received her Ph.D. in psychology from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2000 and was awarded the prestigious Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society for best dissertation of that year. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, until 2002. Tania conducted research on the neural foundations of empathy and fairness in healthy and autistic subjects at the Wellcome Dept. of Imaging Neuroscience, London, from 2002-2005 and at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, from 2005-2006. Currently at the University of Zurich, she is Inaugural Chair of Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics and Co-Director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research. She has published papers on the social brain in Science, Nature, etc., and is Advisory Board Member of the Society for Neuroeconomics. Using a multi-method and interdisciplinary approach combining theories, paradigms, and techniques from disciplines as varied as neuroscience (e.g., functional and structural MRI, rt-fMRI, TMS, EEG), developmental and social psychology (e.g., questionnaires, experience-sampling methods), psychobiology (e.g., hormonal and autonomic measures), and economics (e.g., game theoretic paradigms), she investigates the foundations of human social behavior and, more specifically, the developmental, neural, and hormonal mechanisms underlying social cognition; social and moral emotions such as empathy, compassion, envy, revenge, and fairness; and emotion-regulation capacities and their role in social decision making.