Christian Keysers

Department Head, Social Brain Lab, Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (KNAW), Amsterdam, The Netherlands & Full Professor for the Social Brain, Department for Neuroscience, University Medical Center Groningen.

Christian Keysers (1973) is full professor and heads the Social Brain department at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam. German and French-born, after a PhD with David Perrett, he joined the team of Giacomo Rizzolatti where he contributed to the discovery of auditory mirror neurons. He then moved to the Netherlands where he showed that our brain is deeply empathic: whenever we see the actions, sensations and emotions of others, we activate our own actions, sensations and emotions as if we were in the skin of the people we observe. Christian is one of the founding fathers of ‘social neuroscience’, his work, published in the finest scientific journals, was cited over 3000 times. He won the Marie Curie Excellence Award and his acclaimed new book, The Empathic Brain, explains how empathy is at the very core of human nature.