Tania Singer

Tania Singer is a German psychologist and social neuroscientist and is scientific head of the Social Neuroscience Lab of the Max Planck Society in Berlin, Germany. Between 2007 and 2010, she was Inaugural Chair of Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics and Co-Director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research in Zürich. Her research focuses on the developmental, neuronal, and hormonal mechanisms underlying human social behavior and social emotions such as compassion and empathy. She is founder and principal investigator of the ReSource project, one of the largest longitudinal studies on the effects of mental training on brain plasticity as well as mental and physical health, co-funded by the European Research Council. She further holds a cooperation with the macro-economist Dennis Snower on the topic of Caring Economics. Singer's Caring Economics: Conversations on Altruism and Compassion, Between Scientists, Economists, and the Dalai Lama was published in 2015. She is the daughter of the neuroscientist Wolf Singer.