Tania Singer, Neuroscientist Max Planck-Institut
After completing a psychology degree at TU Berlin in 1996, Tania Singer was until 2000 PhD student at Max Planck Institute for Educational Research in Berlin. Afterwards she was a postdoc at the same institute and at the “Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience” and at the “Institute of CognitiveNeuroscience” in London. In 2006 she became assistant professor at the University of Zurich and from 2008, she was the founding chair of the department “SocialNeuroscience and Neuroeconomics” and co-director of the laboratory for “Social and Neural Systems Research”. From 2010 to 2018 she was Director of the Department of SocialNeurosciences at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and now has the scientific leadership of the Max Planck Research Group “SocialNeurosciences” in Berlin on the North Campus of the Humboldt University in Berlin, the University where she is also an honoraryprofessor.
She is the founder and director of the ReSource Projects, a large-scale, long-term study by the European Research Council on the effects of mental training on mind, brain, behavior and health. Together with Prof. Dennis Snower from the Kiel Institute for World Economics has a collaboration on Caring Economics, which sometimes from Institute of New Economic Thinking was funded. They examine how insights from biology and psychology can overcome the omnipresent idea of Homo oeconomicus and bring about new economic models in terms of collaboration and decision-making. As part of her long-time member of theMind and Life Institute, she organized together with Matthieu Ricard two large conferences with the Dalai Lama in 2010 in Zurich and in 2016 in Brussels, out of which two books have emerged: Compassion in the economy and thePower of care. She is also the author of more than 150 scientific papers and book chapters.
